Hello All!! I'm finally here!!

I was eager to start when I signed in a week ago. After I had to wait a day the confirmation I went through some comments. I learned that Steemit was flooded with new registration and that it could take weeks.

When I was waiting I read a lot of wonderfull articles written by you all! I love this community, everyone is much friendlier and more helpful than other communities.

Today I decided that I've done enough waiting and I found this wonderfull service AnonSteem offered by @someguy123. Shoutout to someguy123 thank you very much it only took minutes to get my account!!

I had already finished writing my introducemyself. Because I had some time to write it, it has gotten quite long!

So let's get into it ;)

Who Am I?

I am currently a college student who is blessed to have discovered blockchain. It has and still is changing my life. My first encouter with blockchain was very negative though and I did not think I would ever come back to it.

It was in 2013 when I was still in highschool when I first heard about bitcoin. Yes, some of you may have a feeling what is about to happen :D. A friend of mine was telling me that he bought this new kind of digital money and that it was going up about 20 dollars each day. I clearly remember the price of bitcoin at that time was around 300 dollars. At first I was a bit wary but then it kept going up to 400/500 dollars. At that point I couldn't resist anymore. So I decided to put 400 dollars (which was like 90% of my whole back account) in bitcoin. Ignorant me thought it would be easy money....

After I got them it was fire. Every day I watched the bitcoin price graph going sky high. I thought it wouldn't take long for me to be a millionair and that I could join Forbes 500 one day. (I know very very silly, but hey, some of you might have thought the same :D)

And then that day came.... I was watching my screen as usually (because my life was only bitcoin at that moment, what else did I need right xD). I watched the graph hovering around 1100 dollars. It stayed at that level for half an hour or so..... and then suddenly the graph dropped to 650 or so. I was frozen at that moment, I couldn't do nothing but just watch. But then my panick disappeared for a short time when the graph bounced back to 1000.

I told myself stay calm... stay calm. Not so long after it was like the big bang exploded for me. The bitcoin bubble burst. It was diving down to 700 dollars and it did not go up again. I decided to just turn off my screen, I couldn't watch it anymore. I went to bed and just cried for that whole night....Oke I didn't feel that sad, but I learned a valuable lesson that day:
Money doesn't come easy.

Fast forward to this year March. I was reading on Facebook that ethereum had risen from 10 to 50 dollars. Even though I decided after the bitcoin crash that I would never invest again, I had a feeling blockchain is something special. I read a lot about new potential technical innovations and blockchain has popped up time after time. Which was actually the only reason I decided to get into the crypto market again.

Boy, I am glad I did. This time I decided to be more prepared, so I spend a lot of time doing my homework on blockchain and I educated myself on investing. When I felt I knew enough, I pulled out 500 dollars out of my bank account, which was frankly all I could spare, (still 100 dollars more than I had in high school xD) and put it in the infamous crypto market.

This time it went much better. I remember the first time I reached 10k you should've seen me dancing behind my computer screen; look below for the beautiful picture of my balance on Coinbase.

I'm not sure if this was an older or newer screenshot. But would you take a look at that sexy 5 figure number. If I could turn it into a stuffed animal I would embrace it everyday and feed it :) (makes no sense I know). In all seriousness though, for some it may not be much, but I am quite proud of myself that I have managed to 20 fold my investment. Actually, at that time about 2 months ago I cashed out around 8.5k when the market was having a big dive (before the bitcoin split). So I managed to keep about 17 times my initial investment before the split. Never would think I would make that much money by basically just sitting at home.

Future Thinker

Enough about my investing venture, moving on to why I decided to join the Steemit community. I am here on a mission. I believe blockchain will bring the next big change to the world after the invention of the internet. However I am not sure if blockchain will have the same impact as the internet had, but I believe it will change many lives (as it is already doing).

I have two passions: investing and thinking about the future
In a sense they are both related. When we are investing, we are basically trying to estimate how a company will preform in the future. My love for investing has just began recently as you might understand:P, but I have always been a deep thinker.

When think about the future I think about things like flying cars, human-like robots which are helping us with air daily tasks, such as doing groceries and mowing our lawns. I also imagine a whole digitilized society, in which we are for example cashless. Never having to fill up my wallet with small change again would be sweet :) and lately I have been thinking a lot about the possibilities of blockchain.

What I will be posting

In my posts I am going to combine my two passions. I will be posting futuristic stuff like the latest technological developments combined with things about investing. For my investment post I will not try to tell everybody in which they should invest, because If am wrong it would be painfull to see people losing money because of me.

Besides the blockchain industry is too young for anyone to make a solid judgement. People who are claiming that they know for sure are just BS'ing, in my opinion. It is still (mostly) a guessing game at the moment. For example if Ethereum would be used by the world as of today, the blockchain would be overloaded and congested. And that is the number 2 crypto currency at the moment, I think that says a lot.

Where I will be putting my focus needs a bit more explaination, I have done this in my mission statement below :). Just a quick overview: I will focus about 70% of my posts on crypto related stuff and the rest on subjects like quantum computing and artificial intelligence. I will post guides (mostly about crypto's) and my thoughts about potential blockchain startups and other subjects.

As there are already good guides available, I found some of them not detailed enough and some of them I found basic explainations of blockchain were necassary for newcomers to be more comfortable in using crypto's (such as how to store coins and how wallets/exchanges work etc). Additionally, I have discovered some handy things a long the way which I want to share :)

A quick thing I want to talk about

I recently saw I video about articifial intelligence which blew my mind. You guys may have heard that computers are beating humans in our own games like chess, poker and Go, considered one of the hardest boardgames in the world. Now computers are beating professional gamers in this game called DotA, which is just impressive and at the same time very scary. Link here

My Mission

On the other side, thinking about the future also worries me. First my personal life. In a few years I will be finshed with college and then I "have to" find something to do for the rest of my life till I retire. I am worried that I will end up with a job I hate. I don't want to be in my eighties and thinking back that I have wasted my life by not pursuing what I really wanted to do. This is also a reason for me to start posting.

When I think about the future on a bigger scale. I am worried about what people are doing to the world. All the waste we are dumping in the oceans, the weapons we are making which could cause mass distruction, the poor people we are letting die.

The world population is growing faster every year. According to worldometers the world population is currently already at 7.5 billion!! (check out their website it is quite amazing to see how many people are coming to this world).

Our living space will be more limited and I wonder how we will divide the space. Are we going to have wars when we reach the point countries have to expand their bounderies? Also, the growing automation, which people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are warning us from. Will there be enough jobs left for everybody?

The world is facing a lot of challenges. We need smart solutions and I think blockchain is one of them. Blockchain is a brilliant technology, however all great things comes with less greater things.

As of this year as most of you have certainly noticed, more and more blockchain companies are popping up. Every week there are new ICO's (Initial Coin Offerings) for which some receive in the hundreds of million dollars like Bancor.

Having followed most of the ICO's I have seen alot of scams and worthless coins. Blockchain companies and exchanges are being targeted by malicious hackers and they have been succesful in stealing millions of dollars. I also read about people losing their coins not only because of hackers, but also because of their carelessness and not knowing how to store their coins properly.

As more people are getting into the crypto space everyday there will be more people targeted by hackers and hurt because of their own ignorance or greed.

A year ago I decided that whatever I will be doing in future, I need to do something helpful for others, because that is what will keep me going and not money. I am not aiming for something very ambitious such as finding a cure for cancer or inventing an unlimited energy source. Maybe eventually:P, but I am setting my sights on what I think is realistic for me and that is in the blockchain comunity. I think that blockchain can help people, which we are already seeing. Unicef for example is using blockchan.

That Is why I want help newcomers of the crypo world

I will do this by sharing my experience: the mistakes I have made, the guides I have followed and much more.
By doing so I hope that more people will do the same so that we will all go into a bright (blockchain) future together :)