Steemit and Me - 9 months later

There's something about a blank page that becomes intimidating.

The notion, perhaps, if you type the write words and the right people see them, that you're casting some sort of spell that could change your life forever. In this particular case, that for so long as the sun doesn't go mini-nova again, so long as we have electricity and internets the holy 21 witnesses shall maintain thy record of thine shitpost into perpetuity.

The witness thing, seems to be remarkably undervalued by those that happen to land in my steemit feed. It seems as though they should be moderately famous and hotly contested, yet through my random osmosis I can't name a single one. I think I may have given my vote for 4 or 5 when I first started my goings on here - but when no one else seems to give a flying rats arse, it's pretty hard for me to do so. I have existential crises to deal with, after all.

Now, I'm 9 months in and I still haven't managed to read the steemit whitepaper. I have vague notions of how things work, and they feel right enough I don't have to bother. I suspect there's something to do with money laundering and tax evasion, but mostly I view it like letting a bank hold your money. Instead of a bank holding money, it's you buying/acquiring steem. There's the steem you have, and the steem you "power up". Instead of the money in the bank "earning" you interest, powering up the steem lets you direct the flow of built-in inflation.

Some schmoe let me hold 100 powered up steem, delegated I think they call it. That and the 20 or so I've acquired over the last year (I actually had about 20 more I transferred in a message a while ago) grants me the super-power of assigning .002 steem-worth of the inflation with 3-5 upvotes every 12 hours or so.

Now there's this new development of SMTs (or something) - precursored by whoever's doing steemengine (or something), which is hijacking the tagging system so route posts into tokens or tribes or whatnots. #palnet and #creativecoin I've seen enough about to be peripherally aware of. Seems to me that these token-tribes might end up in some sort of tribal competition, where each one vies to have a witness in the top 21. That might be a something one day.

Mostly though, what's actually going on in the "community" and on the platform remains a mystery to me. What continues to remain most relevant is that an account is a set of keys, and that set of keys isn't necessarily tied to the legal fictional me - meaning that each of my sub-personalities can its own, or each project or website. Digital identity, at least someone independent from physical reality. Thought-forms granted transaction privileges.

I'm slowly getting over the discouragement of steemconnect now seemingly forcing me to download some weird ass keychain thing. That static cut off my access to the front-ends to the blockchain I had been using up until that change. I really miss the other front ends due to lack of notifications. Even in those though, I hadn't found a way to be notified when my favorite steemian had dropped a fresh post.

Mass adoption and learning curves have never been friends, and 9 months in I checked and I'm still not very far up it. As far as "earnings" go, switching from Chrome to Brave has done me the most good.

Still, with steemit I have the dream of my upvote one day being 2 cents worth - and that's enough for me to put my typing here more often than not. Maybe in other 9 months I'll actually know what's going on around here ;)