How I Bought Some PODS from SportsPodium (Or Baby's First ICO!)

Imagine you're ... an American tourist, backpacking through India to find yourself by Eating, Praying and Loving or whatever. Namaste. You come across some dusty rural area far off the beaten track and, while eating your roadside launglata, you see these kids playing cricket. Now, you're an American so you don't really know cricket but you do know baseball and that's just similar enough to hook your attention.

Anyway, you're watching these kids, these skinny golden kids, playing their game with the thoughtless athleticism of the young and you see ... this one kid. He is good, he is so good! I mean, you just know baseball but even you can see how amazingly good he is. You point your phone and take some video.

source

You board the plane and fly home a week later. Slowly, as you get back into the groove of work and bills and so on, your Indian trip fades away into a pleasant memory, dusted off for new girlfriends as they scroll through your phone gallery.

NOPICTURES; DATA IS EXPENSIVE

Next. Imagine you're a young Indian boy. Your whole world is a dusty corner of Varanasi. Your parents can barely afford to feed you and your siblings but man o man can you play cricket! Your parents can't afford the gear of course but you don't care, you're improvising with junk and sticks and it's all good. Just one problem: you are never going to be discovered.

You are going to grow up, give up on your dream in the name of survival and end up an illiterate barrow-pusher or shipbreaker at Chittagong. The closest thing to a claim to fame you'll ever get is a distant American making out with some girl as his phone slips from her fingers into the sofa cushions - playing video of you as you smack a ball over the horizon ...

... Depressing, right? Happens every day.

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Let's look at another scenario: same tourist, same you the kid, same part of India, same talent. Difference? The tourist has a very particular app on his phone. He takes video of the kid and uploads it.

game changer

A week later, a tuk-tuk driver delivers another American. He brings a couple of cool phones and an idea: what if you, talented kid cricket player, could get paid for playing cricket and getting better at it right here in Varanasi?! What if your performance on that dusty field ten feet from your house could literally buy you brand new gear from Nike and Adidas and whoever the hottest sportswear people in cricket are? And also, food? What if you could do all that and gain a smoother path to the heights of professional stardom -- yet be very much okay even if you never make the national team?

Welcome to the world of Sportspodium.

If you haven't been living the lapidicolous* lifestyle, you have heard the terrm ICO thrown around online roughly a gazillion times this year. It is short for Initial Coin Offering and it's how all the hot new coins get their funding these days. Well, me being largely as poor as a church rat, ICOs have been a theoretical thing -- at least till now.

todayilearned: lapidicolous means "lives under a rock." the more you know!

Say hi to Sportspodium the ICO whose pre-ICO was (is?) Steemit-exclusive. You literally just send them some SBD and they hook you up with some sweet PODS.

What are PODS, you ask? I should, heheheh, probably have started with that, shouldn't I. PODS is the cryptocurrency of SportsPodium.

Okaayyyy, so what is @SportsPodium? Quite simply, SportsPodium is to athletes what Steemit is to blogging i.e. you are rewarded in PODs for doing athlete stuff just as you are rewarded in Steem for doing writerly stuff.

I don't know about you but that vision excited the crap out of me, enough that despite my significant, ah, liquidity deficit, I actually bought into my first ICO ever on the strength of the concept alone. I mean, think about it: think about how it ties together the scouts, coaches, equipment suppliers, sponsors and of course the athletes in a seamless ecosystem of expanding mutual benefit. Forget zero-sum, just bake a bigger pie!

That's the power of cryptocurrency and the Blockchain, that's the power and potential of Steemit, that's the power of inspiration. I am really looking forward to seeing what happens next with this incredible new concept and I hope you are too.

read/resteem/re-upvote/re-tellyourfriends

You know the drill 👆so do all those things thanks and yay. If you'd like to know more, 👇

@sportspodium