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Hi everyone, my name is Claudio, and i’m from Chile (yeah that long and narrow piece of land painted in blue) i speak spanish so i’m sorry for any misspelling… 

This week, specifically June 13, I enter the WORLD of Steemit… if you continue reading you will find why i call it a WORLD.

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I was looking for cryptocurrencies where to invest some bucks because i hear that Bitcoin explode and everyones who invest in the early days now is extremely rich. Well i was thinking of an investment of a few bucks something like 20 o 30 million dollars not much… as you all may know that quantity is easy to obtain in the real world. 

Well first of all i found that i really don’t know nothing about the world of blockchain or bitcoin and how it could change the world and bla bla bla… there’s a lot of videos on youtube to get deepen into the bla bla bla (look at the next video if you want). 

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So when i understand what blockchain is an their potential, i start my quest for gold, which in a small period of time take me to realice that maybe (only just maybe) was to late to buy Bitcoins for a simple reason i don’t have any money … and start any investment without money is a very difficult task. 

I have to say that i found really interesting an promise projects (excluding Bitcoin and Ethereum) like https://maidsafe.net which i feel is going to be amazing if they achieve what they want,  https://ripple.com and their future network, the Storj cloud drive https://storj.io , and so on… 

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Then i found that the blockchain allow for a new form of investments called ICO or initial coin offering (which by the way has no regulation anywhere) where all the projects offer their shares in form of new coins called “whatever you want COIN” and the people invest believing on the projects… logically there’s a lot of excellent on going projects like https://mobilego.io/ but i found crazy things like the Chronobank which when i first saw  remember me Chronotrigger (because of them now i’m playing it again!) or some guys who raised funds for production of synthetic zirconium oxide! the zircoin… in this page  you could find a lot of those ICOs if you want to spend some bucks.

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Following my journey (through the dark) happens that i found a page called Steemit.com, where in simple words pay for publishing new content, not something new in the internet or ask the youtubbers or bloggers around the world, but the form is new and i found that really interesting. 

I’m not a Youtubber, Blogger o Twitterian (or whatever name you say to people using twitter) with thousands of followers moving from another platform to Steemit (like @allasyummyfood, @smokyribs, @flavcity or many others), in fact i don’t think anyone ever follow me in the internet.

Well continuing my quest, i decided to create a new account which took almost 2 days for approbation, but i did it!. 

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When i enter Steemit as everyone i found that i didn’t know anything about the platform (Which has not changed much), the first post i looked was a beginners guide created by @thecrytofiend where i learn about Steem, Steel Power, Steem Dolars, how submit a story and the markdown, and a lot of very useful things.

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I thought that with all that information (and other FAQ and help that i read) i was ready for posting, well then i started to write. 

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I’m a researcher on educational issues so i have a lot of things which only need to be adapted to be well understood by the general public. So my first post was about a recent investigation of high performing public schools, when the post was ready i felt like this could be the greatest post ever created… maybe when i woke up i will have 500 upvotes or more!!. 

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But as you may know none of this happened, only one upvote, guess who it was? yeah mine!!, i think even if my wife or brother create an account they wouldn't have voted for me. 

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So i started the long journey of promoting my post, first of all i enter to the Steemit chat where i had read that one can promote your own post. The first thing i do was copy/paste my link into the GENERAL forum but someone i think the moderator @steemitqa banned me… 

At the first moment i didn’t know what happened… then i read the rules (at the top) and all came sense to me lol… well now as you can see i enter that forum and a kitten tell me that i can’t speak there lol.

Well i left that room where they don’t wanted me, and start promoting what for me was the greatest post of all time on steemit… well at the moment i write this post i have 14 upvotes and a potential payout of $0.5 whatever that means. So i told myself, well myself lets Resteem some post, which by the way i don’t have the slightest idea of what thats mean for me, but for some reason those post appear in my blog!. 

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Then i create the second most influential post in the history of Steemit, i left all my educational research of the note, and i did something where it would have guaranteed something like a million upvotes, i took the top 15 latino hits from youtube and create a list. Think about this (or like me), a list with videos with 1 billion views or more… if only 1% of those or even less the 0.5% or 0.1% of those clicks on my post its going to be great. But again nothing… the only great thing was that @steemradio saw the post and told me to post with some specific hashtag to support them, which i continue doing (they gave me 0.5 steem dolars! for supporting them).

At this point came to my mind all the whales, dolphins and minnows i read (thx to @moonjelly for that photo)… the voting and the promotion could be so different being a whale!. Looking for post related to this i found a lot of initiatives like the one from @gtg who delegate steam power to new users i don’t even know how you do that but thanks, another one performed by @randowhale which i really don’t understand but all the comments say thanks and things like that.

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At this point i found in the WORLD of Steemit things like: a bot called @cheetah which seek to eliminate some abuses on the community; @steemcleaners which i thinks  looks to do the same; also something called witnesses that i don’t know what the hell is but i upvoted @gtg hope for a good reason; and a list of weird things that you don’t even imagine…or maybe you already know.

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A lot happened in less than a week as a Steemian, maybe i will continue here for a long time or maybe not i really don’t know. But i need to mention that be like a whale it is tempting!

I hope you all have a Steemian week, whatever that could mean.

Regards!

Update

At the moment i write this the post https://steemit.com/education/@ciag/student-debt-and-access-to-higher-education raise into the extraordinary sum of  45 upvotes, and https://steemit.com/education/@ciag/effectiveness-of-high-performing-public-schools-added-value-or-just-cream-skimming achive 16 upvotes.

With those upvotes a notification appear from the so called @steemitboard, which is something of getting rewards…i don’t know what could give this to me but whatever, at this point i don’t understand anything…

Update 2 (Jun 21, 2017) - last one

Today i arrived from work and found that something called HF19 was release...

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Well yeah i found that this was not an old transceiver in fact HF19 was for Hardfork 19.. which let me even worse. 

I noticed that for some reason in the afternoon all my potential payments grew... in fact this post raise to almost $60 for any reason, something more than amazing for me. 

Well i started for asking to people what was this upgrade, so i enter the general forum on steemit.chat... yeah now i can speak there!.  

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People started to told me that voting weights increase 4 times, that they change something from exponential to linear... until @CircuitShark came out with this creative explanation...

An amazing explanation which by the way made me laugh a lot... but let me again with more questions than answers. 

So i thought which could be better to explain this than @donkeypong (a new friend by the way, or i think so) he's been around here for a long time so i think if someone understand this should be him. Finally, he kindly explain to me with a lot of detail what was this all about ... so i need to say thanks for that. 

In short i can say that the upgrade seek to fix the inequality of the votes from new and old users, letting now to distribute your voting strength into 10 votes, this used to be 40 per day. And the second is to make the reward allocation linear based on the amount of Steem Power of your account.

Also @howtostartablog found this post and gave to me, where they explain what was this upgrade.

https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/hf19-equality-coming-soon-linear-rewards

Finally, one thing i realice is that the potential payouts went up because of the increased voting power, but this could lead into more floating money which could lead to a depreciation of the Steem/BTC exchange rate.

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So let's celebrate our new money.. and let's hope it does not lose much value! 

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Hope you enjoy it!

HAVE FUN!

Follow me at @ciag

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