Hey there my Hive friends and followers!
Time really flies - it´s November 29 today again and that means that I´m celebrating yet another Hive birthday. I cannot believe that I have been a part of this amazing community for 6 years already. Although my memory sucks pretty bad in general, I still clearly remember that day when I opened my account here and wrote my first post on the terrace of our apartment on the Caribbean coast of Mexico where we lived back then in 2017. What a ride it has been since then! But as I always do in these "birthday posts", let me start out with a bit of stats and numbers first.
Over those six years, I have...
...published 1,848 posts.
...written 34,540 comments.
...got 3,656 followers.
...reached a reputation of 78.8
...earned over 50k Hive in author rewards.
...earned almost 18k Hive in curation rewards.
...but most importantly: made countless friends from literally all over the world and even met dozens of them in real life :)
Just out of curiosity, I scrolled my blog all the way down to the post where I celebrated my first birthday on the chain and found the other four too. For future reference, I will link them all here:
My 1st Hive birthday
My 2nd Hive birthday
My 3rd Hive birthday
My 4th Hive birthday
My 5th Hive birthday
I read them all again and it was interesting to remember and relive the feelings that I had when I was writing each of them. This birthday post, however, is a bit different than all of the previous ones. Unfortunately, this is first one that I´m actually writing as someone who is not a fulltime Hiver anymore, a status that I always was so proud and happy about but also a status, that I - for different reasons - simply couldn´t maintain anymore. Sad but true. The past year was kind of a transitional year for me when I was gradually abandoning the fulltimer status and becoming what we can call for example "Hive normie" :) I have mentioned the reasons for this change on my blog many times already and I don´t want to bother you with them again so let me just say that even though I now post, comment, curate and engage (much) less frequently than before, I still love this place and I really hope to get back to my old "Hive fulltimer" routine one day again. It was a routine that I loved and enjoyed very much over the years and it also was a routine that let me live that exciting and carefree nomadic lifestyle with my wife. That´s something that I will be forever grateful to Hive for.
Now, however, I would like to reflect on those years from a bit different perspective. From what I just wrote, it seems that my efforts to be a Hive fulltimer and live off Hive were not successful, which is actually true. For the most part, I was extremely inefficient with my withdrawals and to cover my real life expenses, I thus have gradually spent all my fiat savings. Now, I have zero fiat reserves and will have to look for a job very soon (once we move out of Prague actually) as I would hate to misspend the rest of my Hive earnings as well. But was this outcome really inevitable? Not at all of course! Let me now play a bit with some numbers to show you...
As I mentioned in the stats above, over the six years, I have earned over 50k Hive in author rewards and almost 18k in curation rewards. If we add other earnings from interests, internal market trading (Hive/HBD), Hive Engine trading, various Hive related airdrops (including the big one after the fork out of Steem), prizes that I have won in contests etc. then, the total number of Hive that I have earned is more than 100,000. I actually know that for sure as I always keep my records and stats about everything, not just Hive. Now let´s play some what ifs... If I was lucky/experienced/skilled enough to sell this amount of Hive at the very ATH, which is - according to CoinGecko - $3.41, that would be some $350,000. That would actually make me a multimillionaire in my country as that would be almost 8 million Czech Crowns at the current rate. An amount of money that you can buy a house for in here or live very comfortably for long years. In some parts of Latin America, Africa or Southeast Asia (and we are talking about some real tropical paradises here), you would be able to live like a king for decades with such an amount of money. Sure, selling the entire Hive earnings at the very ATH is practically impossible but even if I managed to sell just 1/4 or even 1/5 of it at some reasonable price, it would make a huge difference, allowing me to keep living my minimalist and low-cost but exciting lifestyle while also happily maintaining my Hive fulltimer status.
So after putting all these numbers together, I realized that the concept of fulltime Hiving was perfectly real and doable for me and it was only because of my horrible ignorance/bad luck/incompetence/whatever in the "trading department" what put a merciless end to this experiment. So the moral of this story is that if you guys want to be Hive fulltimers, being productive authors and highly engaged community members is not enough. You need to be good at trading as well. Good luck to everyone who have tried or will try this path ;)
This post was created by me for the Hive blockchain exclusively. All rights reserved.
