What I Bought with My Steemit Earnings

The Power of Steem

I've seen lots of inspiring posts about what people were able to afford from their earnings in Steemit. The platform really is changing lives for the better. Here are some posts about what their Steemit activities afforded them.

I also wanted to share my experience and what my earnings from the platform afforded me to-date. I joined Steemit towards the end of July last year. That was at the time when Steem was ranging between $1 to $2.

I started to feel frustrated for not being able to add value to posts I really liked, and decided to move a little amount from my BTC investment to power up and be able to give at least $0.1, and get the slider feature to increase my reach within the community. I powered up from my own pocket about three times summing up to a value of $1,500.

I got addicted to powering up since. I've done trading the Steem-SBD pair using the Internal Currency Market from my liquid SBD rewards trying to increase the value of my SBDs by about 15% each batch, then powered it all up.

What Did I Buy From My Earnings?

• 2,200++ Steem Power now valued roughly at $9,200 (465,000 PHP) - bringing my Steem Power holding to 3,700++
• A separate trading account now worth $2,000 (100,000 PHP). That I intend to grow and put back to Steemit as Steem Power in 3 months.

Yes! Even now when the market is crashing

Why Am I Doing These?

I believe in the future of the platform, and we are still in Steemit's infancy. Yes there are hiccups, and yes it isn't perfect, but which platform is perfect? which project does not have hiccups?

I have always thought of powering up as gassing up. It was a way for me to further my reach within the community by being able to support more authors. Yes, I upvote myself, but I don't think anyone can say I am over-doing it. Majority of my upvotes are still distributed to many authors; family, friends, supporters, veterans, and newbies. Without gassing up / powering up, I would have been limited to supporting a small number of authors, or distributed my upvotes in the same way with a lower value.

I am not a very technical guy so I will not be able to support my belief from a technical perspective. I would instead tell you about what I really like in the general idea of rewards distribution of Steem the currency. Today, Steem is distributed this way:

• 75% go to the reward pool.
• 15% of the new tokens are awarded to holders of STEEM Power.
• The remaining 10% pays for the witnesses to power the blockchain.

We know that the 75% that goes to the reward pool is further divided to a ratio of 25% towards curators and 75% towards the authors. By holding Steem Power, one is able to benefit a sum of 34% of the distribution. This is dependent of course on the volume of Steem Power one holds, and the actual practice of curation.

There is no source of information that gives the Steem Power interest rate today. This is largely dependent upon the the amount of Steem locked up as Steem Power, and the inflation rate which is meant to continue going down by 0.5% every year. This article from @preparedwombat discussed the calculation that puts the interest rate (compounded) near 1.9%. So it is not all for giving back, I would have lied by saying so. With this much Steem Power, I am making nearly 10 Steem per week on curation and interest combined. That is valued at $40 (2000 PHP). When/if the market recovers to put Steem near $6, I will be making the equivalent of minimum salary in the Philippines on curation and interest of my Steem Power holding.

As part of the batch one of Sndbox cohorts, we are encouraged to have a personal power up goal. I want to document my goal in this post: 6000 SP by the end of June.