Life Pre-STEEM

Been a lot of things so far in my limited yet lengthy 31 years on this planet. Never truly ever knew what I wanted to be "when I grew up" so to speak, prefering to simply gravitate towards what felt right at the time and what I had to do in order to make ends meet. From meat cutter to welder, telemarketer through to electrician work and even briefly acting as the managing head of a home security firm the amount of jobs or titles that have been held in my life are plenty. Never bothered finishing school, knowing from an early age that the education system up here in Canada only seemed to test a persons recall ability and didn't truly facilitate a true ecosystem for knowledge seeking individuals like myself. Always had an above average intelligence but have always battled with the sheer lack of ability to see meaning in much.

Just as STEEM was starting found myself essentially an unemployed beggar on the internet, floating around different communities peddling my humour and MS-paint artwork trying to make a bit of cryptocurrency in order to house and feed myself. Having long given up wanting to fit in with the current state of society and being basically appalled by the way current banking cartels were essentially running the planet their came a time where I broke off from society. Essentially going off the grid and abandoning the status quo of "go to school, get a job, have a family, get a mortgage, pay your taxes" in favour of something more naturally aligned with my way of thinking.

A long time buddy I'd met on the internet a few years before known as @pfunk around these parts had turned me onto a new up and coming social media platform called STEEM. At first it kind of looked to good to be true.. But then the payouts started happening.. lo and behold this new social media platform was real and was essentially a ticket away from the somewhat slow decent into poverty and madness I was experiencing around the launch of our STEEM network.

Life After the Launch of STEEM

While I can recall what it was like a few years back when the network first launched I cannot rember the exact time or date when it sort of clicked and STEEM became my life. The whole network and society of STEEM was different back then.. Far higher brow than it is today and I like to think in part I lowered the standards around here in the first year by bringing my own off brand of humour as well as degeneracy to the site. One of my earlier posts titled "How to Milk a Steem Whale" sort of set the bar for things to come in the first years that @klye inhabited STEEM. A picture from the post has been displayed below to help the readers get a feel for the type of humour I popularized on the STEEM blockchain far before anyone else had the (whale) balls to post that sort of thing out of fear of being flagged by the large stake holders..

The "How to Milk a Steem Whale" post earned over $100 at the time of its publishing on the blockchain.. Not only did this prove to me that STEEM could be a respectable source of income for me, helping me get out of my financial slump, but also that the growing community was willing to accept and even reward my off blend of art and humour. It was around this time that other STEEM users were actually contacting me on the Steem.Chat and offering my hundreds of dollars worth of SBD or STEEM in order to draw MS-paint art for their posts. The art I created was featured on the front page of Steemit.com many times, often with other authors commissioning me to do artwork for them. It was a quite glorious time in my life. People knew who I was and the platform was expanding both in users as well as financially with the price of the STEEM token rising quite incredibly during these early days. Given the amount of income I was recieiving from the art commissions and my own posts I became comfortable enough to begin really getting involved in the politics and runnings of the STEEM network, being one of the first users to lend a hand to trying to put together proper documentation for the then basically undocumented steemd and cli_wallet software.

The journey of becoming a witness was one of trial by fire. With absolutely zero prior sysadmin / ubuntu server experience I set out to become a STEEM witness, and with PLENTY of help from people willing to share their secrets of STEEM witness node running I eventually figured it out, and ended up writing one of the first conclusive guides for people to set up their own witness servers titled "The Complete Noob Guide to STEEM Witness Setup" which for the longest time was thee de facto go to article for new STEEM witnesses to reference in order to get themselves up and running in regards to STEEM witness nodes.

From here I also began acting as an ambassador for the STEEM network, reaching out to a number of sites including Coinpayments.net in order to get STEEM integrated into their services, ultimately allowing developers of various types of popular e-commerce sites such as woocommerce for wordpress to easily integrate STEEM payments into their site. It was also at this time that I begun to become more interested in coding and software development and with this came the now offline Steem.Global site which acted as a STEEM seed node as well as the first STEEM faucet the network had. Steem.Global was actually built on the wordpress CMS and featured custom code in order to modify woocommerce to allow it to send outgoing STEEM transfers to users on the site. All users had to do was login every day to collect their free STEEM and then they could withdraw it as they wanted. Somewhere on my harddrives I've still got the site backed up and perhaps in the future given enough income will re-launch the site.

Currently my main focus in regards to STEEM is developing the Steem-Roller.com site, which is an off-chain provably fair 1% house edge dice game that allows gamblers to pick their odds and wagered amount but also facilitates STEEM users to become the house and supply STEEM towards the bankroll with the ability to instantly invest, divest, deposit and withdraw from the site as they see fit. Another key feature of the site is that investors can use leverage on their investments in order to maximize their potential earnings, given that leverage of up to 99x is allowed on users funds. As a STEEM developer I believe it is very important to have a secure and dynamic investment vehicle for STEEM in order to boost it's use cases and therefore leading to its rise in price. With the Steem-Roller.com site I've created and will continue to develop a multi use platform for STEEM in hopes that it will create demand for the STEEM token and thus increase the market cap / value of the network itself. The site so far, even though just in an online alpha development phase, has played host to almost 35,500,000 bets and has had roughly 2,800,000 STEEM bet on the site.

While as it sits I'm barely scraping by due to STEEM prices being lower than they once were and the support for my development efforts as well as witness campaign seemingly having dwindled over the years the fact of the matter is that I am still here, trying to develop things for the STEEM ecosystem in order to make all of our stake worth more than it currently is. My hope and goal is to be able to earn a respectable living as a 3rd party STEEM developer while helping the ecosystem grow as I can. In order to do this more support is required but regardless of my witness rank, post income or development pledges received I will continue trying to push forward and bring what I can for the ecosystem we have built here on STEEM. Only reason I'm powering down currently is to pay for my witness server monthly bill, while it isn't breaking even and is running at a loss with my current rank of #75 I'll continue to run it as long as I can afford to do so from my SP.

Our STEEM network inspired me to teach myself how to be a software developer, an artist, a comedian.. but most of all a member of a community bigger than myself. Without STEEM ever happening I dread to think of where I would have ended up today. Certainly glad that even 3 years after the start of all this, that the community is still here and has tons of potential on the horizon, as the future of the network and its users certainly has the potential to be bright and prosperous for all.

If you have a spare witness vote I'd highly appreciate the support. Every vote matters and showing your support really helps!
Thank you in advance!

Cheers to @theycallmedan for putting this initiative on:
How Has Steem Impacted Your Life Initiative