According to HiveBlocks, my account was created on 2016-08-11 at 19:16:36 (presumably UTC). This was on the old version of our blockchain, then called ~~Steemit.~~ It was a wild era. The initial hype bubble had burst. I assumed it would be another flash-in-the-pan crypto token soon to fade into obscurity, but I decided to write whatever was on my mind.
People read it. Not a lot at first, but I found people to follow, and some of them followed me. Before there were communities, I found like-minded people here. As the platform continued to develop, I made friends, and maybe a few enemies.
Life was good.
In 2020, we learned that ~~Ned~~ was selling the pre-mined stake and all brand assets to a certain ~~Justin Sun.~~ To make a long story short, this was a very big deal, the community's worst concerns were realized, and the real witnesses were replaced by sock puppets. They, and other independent developers, set up Hive as a hard fork to put an end to this dispute and retain ownership by the community completely divorced from corporate crypto bro BS.
Here we are today, still going strong. Here I am, nine years in, and still tagging along.
In the past year, I made some major milestones. I hit the threshold of 100,000,000 vests for Orca rank. Everything I have here was earned on-chain, with a slight boost from trading STEEM for HIVE after that hard fork, but I count that as still being on-chain activity. I also hit 60,000 staked HIVE tokens, so that feels like a big achievement, too.
Life offline hasn't been easy. Since my last HIVE birthday, I quit my job as a librarian and have been working my way through my personal possessions trying to decide what to sell, store, and pack as I try to decide what to do next with my life. I also hit a major decade birthday milestone, so there's some pretty major realizations and personal conflicts that came with it, too. Health challenges continue. I don't write a lot about my personal issues because I don't want to be another "woe is me" voice on an internet saturated with that on Web2 already, but it doesn't feel right to ignore those harder realities or pretend life is all hunky-dory either. That's another Web2 habit some have, showing a saccharine-sweet facade to cover up real pain and bitterness.
I'm not giving up on life, though. Far from it. I'm not giving up on blogging, either, although it will continue to be sporadic. Various drafts and half-formed ideas will probably congeal soon, so keep an eye out if you're interested in my peculiar potpourri of posts.
Finally, remember, the blockchain is the answer to many questions people don't yet know they need to ask. I joined ~~Steemit~~ because the idea of a censorship-resistant platform appealed to my principles and ideals. I joined the Hive fork because they delivered on that idea when problems arose. We're on the bleeding edge of a quiet technological revolution where writing is fighting, where votes actually matter, and where you can own your content. That's worth something, so don't worry about the market spot price. The real value is in freedom, and when people realize they need it, we're here with years of evidence it works.
Keep calm and blog on!