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Hey everyone!

There are a lot of new people joining Steem lately and so many in here that have been around for a while, many also before Steem existed.

I personally did a lot of mistakes in the past when I stumbled upon cryptocurrencies. I used to mine a lot of GPU only coins in the beginning with a few GPU's, I knew that many of them would go up in value but compared to many of the GPU-farms it felt like I was getting too little daily returns. I wanted to increase it in any way I could, back then there were no proof-of-brain coins like Steem today, you either had to invest your fiat money or spend a lot of electricity and wear-and-tear on your GPU's to mine them.

There was of course also trading. Exchanges made it possible to trade your way up by costing very little to trade from coins to coins (in most cases 0.2% per trade). Boy was I not prepared at how stressful trading would be though. Over time I learned that the less often I traded the more I had the advantage to increase my value in crypto thinking that most of the currencies I was trading with were going to go up long term. That kind of removed a risk and gave you an advantage, but before that I used to trade coins daily. Small profit changes and you'd take the profit and put it onto another coin. The waiting was the worst part, many didn't move for weeks/months - you often felt the need to trade a coin at a loss cause you thought another one would go up short-term to make up for it.

It would have been nice if many of the coins were able to be mined in other ways such as by providing work or a service for them, but as someone that couldn't code it felt impossible. I really think that in this regard Steem often gets underappreciated, here you can earn by providing something of value to the community. It doesn't even always have to be contribution as long as you are good at creating content, drawing attention to yourself by other stakeholders and/or just being a good commenter - you had a chance to be rewarded for your time. That is what got me hooked on Steem ever since I joined and why I have high hopes for this currency in the future.

I figured out way too late that the best method of growing your investments was just to hold. Take profits when you receive a lot of them and other than that just hold it out. This was of course before Tether existed - so converting to fiat made it a lot more complicated if you wanted to just keep your profits for some time to buy back later. Things have changed a lot since then.

What is something you wish you had known about cryptocurrencies earlier?

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