Recently I was asked how I managed to get all my Steem Power. Actually it has been a long road for me with a lot of mistakes. I’ve found out a lot of things about myself along the way. Some things take a long time to mature and time is your friend if you use it right in any investment strategy.

Crystal Light Splashing - Some of the most beautiful crystals take a long time to grow; taken on 9/19/2018 – click for viewing full screen

I’m been collecting Steem for some time, mostly through blogging, curating, and commenting but I have also purchased and traded coins for my Steem Power. I like Steem Power mostly as a way to give back some to others by voting on content and for the chance of long term success. ## My road taken so far Personally I got interested in crypto many years ago mainly because of its potential to change society and solve many ecological problems we are facing. I started out mining Bitcoin, then moved to Alt Coins. GPU, CPU, ASIC mining - been there done that. I put some fiat money into crypto by purchasing alt coins and bitcoin. I lost a lot from the my experiences at Cryptsy and some at Bittrex. I made a lot of mistakes and bad investments. I found out hardware mining is really resource intensive and takes a lot of electricity. Some coins are profitable for only a short period of time. For this reason, I turned to coin trading and mining mostly of proof of stake coins and recently retired all of my other proof of work mining. I have no regrets though and actually have some pretty cool collectors item type ASIC miners that I like. (If you like collecting old computer hardware) Plus many of the crypto coins I mined have held value or were sold for other coins – I really can’t complain. ## Where I’m heading Right now I’m hodling. (Holding on for dear life) I’m keeping my crypto assets and trading them around looking for things that I think will make a good return on investment. My expenses are low so this works with some budgeting for me. If Bitcoin goes back up I might start cashing out a bit again. It usually goes up around the end of the year. I’m always looking into different new coin projects and open source software technologies and thinking about how they might work out. I’m trying to think about how to make a good decentralized system that will help out a lot of people. If I see something that I think might fit this potential I invest in it, either by looking into it in more depth or financially. It is a bit of dance. I don’t always approach it by intellect. Mostly it is a gut feel or by doing things that appeal to me at a deep level. I suppose I could get better results if I told myself to post every day, or comment all the time at Steemit, or do any number of things better. Study more computer languages, focus on software development more, etc., etc. Learn how to write better, produce more interesting photography, captivating art, become a little more social... the list goes on and on. Somehow at this point in life I feel more relaxed. If things don’t always work out as good as they could, it is okay and I try not to beat myself or others up too badly for the mistakes that happen. Right now things are changing very rapidly. I hope we all heading towards greater success. ## Centralized verses Decentralized One of my main crypto investment strategies is to focus a lot of attention on how centralized or decentralized things are. Systems that are decentralized tend to be permissionless. Anyone can join and do things without any type of central authority. They are inclusive at first of many people but coin distribution is always an issue and early adopters tend to do better than others. Bitcoin in the beginning was very decentralized, anyone could join and mine coins on a simple computer. As systems mature they tend to get more and more centralized. This isn’t always bad if key players can cooperate enough. If everyone values things enough a lot of common resources like software updates, exchange listings, and block explorers will get paid for. If not, a lot of the smaller cryptocurrencies tend to suffer from a sort of ‘tragedy of the commons’ and melt into obscurity when the last node shuts down for lack of anyone else to help move the blockchain. Some centralization in the right way is therefore good. Projects that have a lot of overhead need some method of paying for common resources, in particular software development can be very expensive. A rogue central authority can really mess things up though. Most projects that I have seen that suffered from a high degree of central authority have not ended up being very good investments. ## Going by gut feel There are certainly many other things to think about in planning investments in crypto. Sometimes I think I’m better off just going with my gut feel. By that I don’t mean getting caught up in FOMO (fear of missing out) or FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) but really zoning in on how I feel this will be of benefit to people. Something that benefits many people and works in a more efficient way than how things are currently being done should be a good investment unless your gut really tells you otherwise. Even if things don’t always work out, at least you did what you felt was right at the time. There are certainly many ways to earn Steem Power or other cryptocurrency, my hope is that it will be easier for many new people to get involved in doing this. *** Thanks for reading! I always value your support and comments. The picture was taken by me with my Galaxy S9+.