Hello, STEEMers!

While I was researching ALTCOINS I stumbled upon STEEMIT and decided to take part in this great project. This is my first article so I will be telling you a few thing about myself and how I got into cryptocurrency trading.

My name is Valentin Dragomir and I'm a power engineer for the Romanian TSO. I'm 28 years old, born in Targoviste (Vlad the Impaler stayed there in the 15th century) and I've been living in Romania's capital, Bucharest, since 2014. I've always been interested in art, engineering and coding, but it is recently that I've discovered a new passion, CRYPTOCURRENCY. Continue reading and you'll find out how and what I’ve encountered so far. :D

STORY TIME!

Two weeks ago I was working at my office, the usual stuff, and a thought came to me from ... somewhere, most likely from my minds unconscious side, where it stayed latent for God knows how long. That thought was just a word, a simple, well thought, arrangement of letters meant to hold the future in its digitally structured hands, „BITCOIN”.
Just that, „BITCOIN”, not with a question or exclamation mark, not with any other words, verbs or nouns, just that one single word said with confidence but barely perceivable, like a whisper, „BITCOIN”. I must've heard it before or maybe I've seen an add on the usual pages that I browse, who knows, the fact is, it made its way into my permanent memory and started drilling until it became a whisper.
Since then, somewhere when BITCOIN went to approx. 1800 USD (a few weeks ago, meaning that I'm a newb in cryptoverse), I have been reading, watching, counting and analyzing everything I can lay my hands or eyes upon, only to satisfy this hunger for BITCOIN knowledge. The first few days I spent researching the mining side of cryptocurrency thinking that it might be that king of thing that might bring me a steady nice income. I made my own sheet in Excel to calculate the monthly income after all expenses with cloud and local mining for a whole year. The calculation wasn’t convincing enough to make me get into mining due to the fact that by buying the bitcoin now I would spare myself a lot of grief. I decided that instead of burdening myself with energy costs, maintenance, heat, downtime, pools and other things that may or may not happen during the mining process, to take a look at „buy low sell high” in the cryptoverse.

This was the hardest part, studying how to get into mining was nothing compared to researching where to buy bitcoin from, what trusted sources are out there, when to buy, why should you buy, where to keep the currency and then what ALTCOINS to invest in. It is worth mentioning that the task of getting to a point where I felt confident enough with the knowledge I gained on cryptos (lets be honest, you can't learn everything in just a few weeks) to actually get into analyzing ALTCOINS was done with great attention and determination. By taking your time to understand what cryptocurrency is, what makes it tic, you are eliminating the second-guessing when you're in front of a monitor that displays a PayPal payment acceptance button.

The next several days I've started viewing YouTube videos, from "The Dollar Vigilante", "Ameer Rosic" and other channels on how to invest in cryptocurrency. Started reading White Papers of different company's, learned what an ICO is ( also found out what an IPO is) and then i found out that a major change is on the way, BIP 91 or BIP 148 ... aaand i was back to the drawing board. Trying to fit the information acquired on those BIP's into the already drawn canvas with the info that I "mined" the days before and make seance of all of it in order to get the "full picture" cost me another day.

Finally, after research and research, BTW, I actually started dreaming of cryptos and trends, I went on and made an account on COINBASE to buy some BITCOIN (actually a few fractions of a BITCOIN - each fraction called Satoshi) ... aaaand I couldn't buy because the website doesn't "work" with my country. After researching some other possibilities I found a working one, COINMAMA (10 dollars fee :O) and finally got 60 dollars worth of BITCOIN straight to my JAXX wallet. I admit I got pretty annoyed when I had to make several accounts on different websites just to find out that they don't sell to my country or that they needed a lot of time to check my credentials before being able to actually buy the currency.

After I "stuffed" my wallet with BITCOIN I went back to researching ALTCOINS that might bring a hefty return after a given period of time and patience. Since I didn't have a lot of BITCOIN I decided to look over ALTCOINS that are under 1$. The reason why I decided that was to get a bigger number of that ALTCOIN. So, I put 50% in Ripple and the other 50% in Civic. For the moment I'm learning, researching and waiting for BIP 91 to settle, after which I'm going to invest in what I deem worthy and of course, share it with you guys.

Conclusion

In the end I can honestly say that I HAVE NO IDEA OF WHAT I'M DOING but I'm excited and happy to be part of THIS REVOLUTION. Learning about cryptos, investments and the glue between them is a process that needs not be rushed. Of course we all make mistakes, the idea is to make them with an affordable sum :D. I had in mind not to bore you so I skipped a few things like; deciding what wallet to use and what websites I've visited for research, but don't get upset these are stories for another time.

Please, feel free to ask me stuff, criticize me, advise me or teach me something by writing comments below.

Best regards,
Your fellow newb STEEMer,
Valentin

Take the time to be the best you can be!