Taking the plunge

Hiya all,

About me

I'm Faab. I'm a 22 year old Data Center & Linux Engineer from the Netherlands, avid F1 fan (Red Bull Racing), car enthusiast and overall nerd. I'm also the proud owner of a VW Golf Mk3 from 1994.

That's the TLDR! Now for the specifics!

I work for a medium to large Managed Service Provider. We do everything from hosting down to ISP/Connectivity services. We do that for large clients like the government, all the way down to small businesses and even consumers. Within that I have a lot of varying tasks that I execute. I do the majority of on-site work, that goes from swapping faulty hard drives, to providing new connectivity clients with fibre-optic Internet connections. When I'm not on-site, I'm either at home or in the office, doing mostly Linux sysadmin stuff, again with a wide range of tasks that I execute.

When I'm not working I have interests all over the place. Like I said before I'm a car enthusiast and own a young-timer myself, so you can find me in my garage that I rent with a friend, or during the summer, at car meets throughout the country, and sometimes, out of the country too. 🚗
I'm a gamer, currently dedicating too much of my free time on Rust, but have another 300+ games on my Steam account.
Also like I said before, an avid F1 fan. My heart goes out to Red Bull Racing, but I'm a huge fan of the sport itself and planning to go to the 2023 Austrian GP! Maybe that would make for a nice travel post 🏎

Why Hive?

For years I've been watching the crypto-space from the sidelines. I've always been interested in the blockchain technology behind it and seeing what some people do with it. However, it's also been (at least to me) an intimidating world to enter. It's ever-growing but also constantly changing, both positively and negatively. Because of that, I never felt the need or urge to enter the crypto world. That changed when I got my first full-time job and started earning a fixed salary. Quite quickly I saw the savings I worked for losing it's value quite drastically, and the interest rates are laughable. I started entertaining the idea of putting some of my savings into stablecoins, however that idea was put on hold after seeing what happened to Terra Luna. Not long after that, the FTX scandal erupted, so even if I could trust the token to hold it's value and actually stay stable, I'd better hold it on an exchange that won't gamble with my money.

Last night I asked my friend @dubble if he had any recommendations for a stablecoin and he introduced me to HBD, and along with that, the Hive network. He was very excited to tell me all about it and his excitement rubbed off on me. Seeing what's possible on the network, apart from just collecting interest on HBD savings, got me excited too. He sent me an article about the history of Hive, mostly the reason of it's creation and the events leading up to that, and it resonated with me. A network with transparent governance would definitely take some of my general fears surrounding crypto away.

Taking the plunge

I slept on it for a night, and while I'm not quite ready to invest heavily with my savings yet, I'm definitely keen to seeing what the Hive network has to offer me and what I can offer to it. I've had some tokens sitting around in a wallet that I bought ages ago and have not touched since, so I've swapped it all for HIVE. At that point, it finally clicked in my head that @dubble has had a Hive Punk NFT for years now. I've always seen that as his profile picture and only now I realized where that came from. After that, I figured if I was going to be a part of the Hive Network, I might as well make myself distinguishable, so I took some of the HIVE that I came in with, and bought a Hive Punk NFT, also my first NFT, if you don't count the free Reddit NFTs.

I'm very excited to learn and experience this platform. If any of you have any pointers, that would be extremely appreciated.