Hello Steemit Community! 

                

I'm Jennifer Jarvis.  I write mostly non-fiction on my website flavor-pro.com which focuses on educating people on the ways of mixing their own e-liquid for vaping.  I also write fiction, but have yet to publish anything on the market yet. I am only just starting my real journey into cryptocurrencies and investing in them, though I am not a stranger to traditional investing with fiat currencies. I kick myself for not putting money into bitcoin back when it was only in the $200 range, I knew it would become a big thing, but I didn't know when and kept putting it off.  I did manage to get into the market during a recent dip down around the $7500 point, but missed the bigger drop just a few days before waiting for money from my bank to get into my Coinbase wallet. 

                                    My Vaping Story

I was a smoker for 14 years, buying my first pack of cigarettes shortly after I turned 18. I quit smoking a few times during that time for periods of time ranging from a week to 10 months, but always went back to smoking in times of stress. In 2009 I tried an e-cig for the first time when a co-work offered me a Blu to try.  I purchased a pack of Blu's but they just didn't get the job done. I went back to smoking for a while after that.  In 2010 I started off the year with a purchase of the Joytech 510 batteries with replaceable atomizers and e-liquid from a local company that had only started up about 6 months prior. It was more satisfying than the Blu, but it still wasn't fully satisfying. 

I started looking into mixing my own, and for the good portion of the year of 2010 I was still smoking while cutting back using vaping, though I struggled trying to making my own e-liquid with some pretty poor tasting flavoring, so my struggle was real. I spent most of 2010 learning what little info I could find about mixing and experimenting with some of the flavorings that folks talked about in the forums.  By 2011 I got myself some better equipment, invested in better flavors, and got very serious about learning everything I could about flavoring, the chemistry of flavoring production, and mixing for vaping.  

After a full 18 months of learning and experimenting and letting other friends in the vaping world try out my e-liquid creations, I looked into creating a business for myself.  At this point there were no regulations here in the states, so it was quite easy to get started with a small supply and a website.  I closed my actual e-liquid business down as I was pregnant and the workload to keep up with orders was simply too much for me to handle on my own, and I wasn't making enough money to hire someone else to work with me. So, I turned to creating recipes for other companies and became more heavily involved in the DIY community.  During the early part of 2015 after my son was born I worked on writing an ebook on how to DIY, which can still be found for download for free on my website flavor-pro.com.  

I haven't smoked a cigarette in about 5 years. I consider vaping to have saved my life from an early death caused by smoking. While there is a campaign right now by the governments of the world to demonize vaping (with the exception of the UK) due to the moneys through sin taxes and in USA their Master Settlement Agreement with Big Tobacco which pays them based on cigarette sales - each state gets paid based on their own cigarette sales - so no one wants to give up that Big Tobacco money.  When a state takes out loans against their MSA payments they then have to have sales reflect how much they borrowed, and when their sales are disrupted and decreased they can't pay back their loans.  Even for states that haven't taken out loans, they count on that MSA money to go into their general funds in order to fund their yearly budgets. As much as the FDA and the officialdom claims they don't want people smoking, that smoking kills, and that everyone should quit, in their other hand they are hoping people continue to smoke and new smokers come into the market so that they can still continue to get their MSA moneys. 

Vaping has been as disruptive as cryptocurrencies will become in the long run.  The governments of the world will try to ban vaping or regulate it so heavily so that there is no monetary benefit for smokers to switch to vaping. They also publish false and misleading information in campaigns to make smokers and potential smokers think vaping is worse than smoking or just as bad, so why bother vaping? Right? But genuine research being done by those who truly want to know the possible dangers with vaping have shown that it is at the very least 95% safer than smoking.  That 5% negative health effects could even be improved upon as innovation in equipment and study on flavoring safety continues. However, if the governments have their way, researching for increasing safety through new design and testing would be halted through regulation and steep market entry requirements to keep new products off the market and prevent more smokers from switching.  

I plan to use this account to share my experiences in vaping with the Steemit community and bring new Steemit users in from the vaping world where Youtube has set out to demonetize all vaping videos (with claims that their ad providers don't want to advertise on our channels) and on social media where they have prevented the vaping industry to advertise to their followers and are actively hiding vaping related posts from people's newsfeeds/timelines.  

                                           Cryptos

I am only getting into the world of cryptocurrencies. I've got a little bitcoin (not very much) which I only just purchased while it was below $8000 USD value.  I'm building up some ETH and LTC while I'm at it and working on getting paid more often by crypto rather than fiat currencies. I have been following Clif High's webbot work since 2009, and while I don't always think his interpretation of the data he gets is always 100% accurate, his thoughts on cryptos over the years have been pretty spot on. I wish I had gotten into bitcoin back in 2012 when Clif was talking about getting into it.  I think that cryptos are the start of the future for humanity, to break away from the corrupted system that has been in place for a millennia or more.  Since most of my social media is dedicated to my vaping business, I plan to use my page here to also discuss things outside of the world of vaping, like cryptos and my journey into investing with them.  

                                     Storytelling

While I'm an avid vaper, my actual training is in writing. I've been a non-fiction and fictional writer for going on 2 decades. I haven't published anything through traditional routes as far as non-fiction goes, most of that has been on my own sites and blogs. My fictional work has never left the realm of private viewing by friends or family.  I am currently working on a very complicated fictional story in my spare time that I may end up publishing some of the chapters here for public viewing. I may also use this for some writing exercises in the form of short stories in order to keep my storytelling muscles in shape. 

Thanks for joining me here Steemit community members, it is a pleasure to become part of a new community that is not part of the "old system."