Hello Steemit, glad to be on board

Hi, I'm a private kind of individual so I'm not going to be sharing much personally identifying information. You can call me Raziel though. I started using the internet back in the time when not giving out your name or location was considered the norm and its stuck with me, so I tend to stick to the sections of the internet that allow for anonymous and pseudonymous posting. No offense intended to those who are more open, that's just not my style though.

I am happy to talk about general things like my hobbies and interests, as well as what brought me to crypto and steemit in particular though. I spend a lot of time trading cryptocurrencies, watching anime, playing video games, playing poker, and beekeeping. I also enjoy listening to jpop and classical music, odd mix I know.

EXPERIENCE WITH CRYPTO

Back in early 2014 I read a few articles about bitcoin and did some looking into it. I liked what I saw as it being a way to get away from the current monetary system we have as well as the decentralized nature and decided to get a bit just to experiment with. I was both pleased by how quickly it went up in value, the quick transaction times(it was a lot faster back then) as well as the fact that I could buy things on Amazon at a discount as Amazon cards were often sold at discount by people looking to cashout. Also during this time I got deeper into looking at crypto and discovered altcoins. I had some success with trading those on a site called Cryptsy only to have those gains disappear due to what happened with that site, however that is a story for a different time.

Bitcoin later began to suffer a bear market but I decided that I believed in the tech and that I would simply not pay much attention to it for a few years so that I would not develop weak hands and sell, which is a decision that has most definitely proven to have paid off recently. With the recent surge its got me to look back into crypto and its amazing how different things are. I plan to talk more in depth about this in future posts as I think it may offer a novel viewpoint to hear from someone who was into crypto, took years off, and is now looking at the differences both in terms of community as well as use cases.

WHAT DREW ME TO STEEMIT

Steemit in particular has recently attracted my attention. I think that the structural framework is superior to all other social media sites in terms of benefit to the users. The most obvious benefit is of course being paid to post, but its much more than that. For one you don't have steemit selling every scrap of info they can gleam from you to advertising agencies as Facebook and twitter do. While there is some wiggle room they've built in in their privacy policy they state that they will not share cookies and will not share browsing history to advertisers, that is a huge improvement.

Another aspect that I believe is overlooked is the censorship resistance. Sure you can be easily demonetized if you upset a whale or a group and your content made harder to view but it will still be there thanks to the blockchain. That is still far superior to how more centralized social media sites result in things like shadowbanning and complete content deletion with no recourse whatsoever. With steemit if you have a network of other users on the site who know you there's a way out, there's an avenue of escape and opportunity to recover after the whale's forgotten about you, that's much better in my opinion to the current status quo.

I plan on making posts about cryptocurrencies, both trading and blockchain use cases, video games, and possibly even some about politics. I also might see some of you in the poker leagues I see forming on here. Thank you for taking the time to read this and I look forward to interacting with people here.