Bias

When I was still studying I had a certain resentment of how things worked in the world such as employment and working for "the man". Growing up at the same time as the internet was developing I saw my future self working for myself, not doing labor work which someone else was profiting from more than me while he orders people around. It wasn't much about being jealous that someone had a certain idea first and created a business out of it and fairly profited from it more than others that did not take the risk. It was more about certain jobs that were unnecessary to have a middleman to begin with.

A lot of these jobs were due to the early internet phase, many not understanding what it was and how it worked, many things becoming easier due to it but not as easy as they could be, such as payment options. If I could send an email or a text message for free to person x in country x within seconds, why was it so difficult to send them money? Why did there have to be so many different payment providers and services that only accepted some? A lot of it still seemed wrong to me in many ways.

I still remember the first time I stumbled upon Bitcoin, it was quite by accident really when I was getting desperate about buying something for a game I used to play and there were no options for me to pay for it. We've all heard that a lot of people, although I'm pretty sure many like to pretend they've heard and known what Bitcoin was really early on, stumbled upon Bitcoin as well for a short time. I guess its quite understanding considering it was still so new but those that had bought or mined into it wanted to promote it so more people bought it for their own interest in profiting from it. A lot of people didn't quite get Bitcoin though. It's not that it was that complicated to understand, if you were to explain to someone today what it is and what it enables I'm sure they'd have a much easier time to get it, or maybe we've just gotten a lot better at explaining blockchain technology over the years. The importance of Bitcoin was still not big at the time, some of it due to market cap probably, some due to the small userbase but most of it due to not making it obvious what it was and stood for I believe. I consider myself lucky that I was bored and procrastinating on homework that I decided to jump deep into the whitepaper and other threads about Bitcoin in the spring of 2013. I was curious at first and as I was continuing to read I saw a connection to when I first learned about p2p torrenting and at some point it just clicked and it blew my mind.

That is one of the reasons I consider myself lucky to have been an early adopter and stayed interested in blockchain and all the projects and currencies that sprouted around it. I am sure not many bothered with digging deep enough to get it on the same level as me to interest them in it as much as it did for me. I remember when altcoins started popping up, most using the same fundamentals of blockchain tech as Bitcoin was. Many were similar and in a way unnecessary but many had differences that could have real world use cases, one of the big ones I got fascinated with was Ethereum which if I remember correctly wanted to create their smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain but as we've learned the Bitcoin developers are not keen on developing much.

I still remember the early times of trading Ethereum on Poloniex and trying to let others know about it, back then I was certain that it had the potential to even pass Bitcoin very soon and it hasn't been far off. A few of my friends did listen to me even though most of course did not get the same interest or just did not get it and thought I was just trying to get them to buy something so I myself would profit from it. The internet was filled with scams and certain high yield high risk ponzis, I don't blame them that they thought this would not be anything different and just vaporware for what they actually had planned. The same thing happened with Ethereum where the more you read about it the more your mind was blown and you saw the potential of the huge changes it could bring to the world and the internet.

Then came Steem.

With a history of being a very active Redditor it took me the shortest amount of time to see Steem as the next big thing and this was way back where it was only about blogging, not all the other aspects it can now revolutionize.

Without trying to brag too much about me being interested in the right things very early, knowing many of you did not have the chance just because you didn't hear about it in time or something had made you not want to learn about it more because we know how mainstream media works and the reputation of Bitcoin that Silk Road brought to it. I want to get into the bias of it all.

There were many who after having already invested or mined their Bitcoin stake saw everything as a huge competition and became big maximalists about it which to me felt kind of ironic cause every time I tried to let others know about Bitcoin, especially those invested in stocks and similar were really against it the same way as Bitcoiners were against altcoins. Even though most of my own investments were in Bitcoin and Ethereum and I didn't even felt the need to keep trading between the two as both had already brought me decent profits over the years, there is always the greed factor that wants the highest amount of profit from one thing and one thing only.

Steem had a huge red flag from many back in the day, not just because of Tone Vays unfair allegations of it being a scam but the whole Bitcoin maximalist sector not giving it a break. Steem did not care though, it continued to distribute its stake to anyone that came to the platform and worked for it and also distributed profits to anyone who bought at the right times and held long enough. I myself did not even buy any Steem with my holdings at first and just spent most of my time on the platform instead, but as I was trying to let other people know about this opportunity they kept shutting me down. Calling me a shill, someone who is biased towards it because he probably has a lot of stake (its not difficult to keep stake on exchanges or alt accounts of course), etc.

It felt crazy to me, especially since I didn't have much Steem to begin with and was only talking about what I had read about it and how fascinated I was by Steem's blockchain and its advantages to proof of work ones. It seemed perfect for the things it wanted to accomplish.

Things have not gotten any better lately as my stake has grown, it seems like people have an even bigger excuse to called me biased towards Steem because of my holdings. Weirdly enough it never seems to cross their mind that I've been biased towards a lot of other crypto projects in the past and that I'm only trying to "shill" the blockchains I believe have actual value and real world use case - which many currently existing lack.

I believe that the last all time high of most cryptos went way too high, it was not ready for those gains and it could've easily been manipulations that lead to those numbers so certain individuals could profit more than what naturally would've occurred. I hope that this next accumulation phase doesn't take too long but it wouldn't surprise me if it did, one thing I would really appreciate is if the dumb money would stop just pumping up everything and people did some research during this decline to know which projects actually have some real potential to change existing centralized services and bring more fairness to the world.

In the end it doesn't matter much what we are biased about as long as it is better solutions to currently existing problems and I hope blockchain and crypto will be a big part of it.

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Thanks for reading and as always feel free to discuss the post in the comment section. I read most of them and reward good ones.