I started with Publish0x in January of 2020. The first month I was a reader and commenter only. Then I decided to start writing articles and get more into cryptocurrency. I have been on a wild ride and learn a whole lot of things along the way. I am not a crypto expert, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn last night. (It was a joke from a commercial in the US years ago).

I have mined my fair share of coins over the last 1.5 years. I have played my fair share of games over the same time. I have seen websites come and go in the crypto space. I have seen coins come and go. I have seen airdrops happen and everyone lose their minds over it. It has been a wild ride and I am here to tell you all about it.

Shortly before joining Publish0x or maybe at the same time I learned of a site called Sliver.tv. It was a website kind of like Twitch where you could watch live streams. I got into it and had it going on while I was busy at work throughout the day. It was shortly after joining that site that I realized I could run a node myself. I wanted to run a node for a few reasons. At the time I thought the only people that could run nodes for blockchains where people with super beefy computers and a lot of the token available to stake to the node. So when the chance to run my own node for a blockchain with nothing besides a crappy old desktop I jumped at the opportunity. I wanted to earn passive income sure, but I always wanted to help the blockchain. It was a sense of pride to be able to say "hey I have been running a node for X amount of years". That was the main reason to be honest. 

Well fast forward 1.5 years and the computer I am using has changed but I have ran that node pretty much 24/7 (except when Windows Updates happens and I don't catch it). That little node that just has been relaying video streams and earn me 10,000+ TFUEL that has no enabled me to be able to stake it on the new node version and earn true passive PoS income. Right now it's about $2/day on TFUEL I earn for staking.

Along the way of reading some really bad Publish0x articles and some really good ones I found a few articles that people would post in regards to different tokens/coins. Not the ones talking about why this particular coin is going to balloon in price in X amount of days. I never cared about that because if there is one thing I learned with Crypto is that nobody can predict what is going to happen to any 1 coin. The articles I am talking about though are the ones in regards to basically "X crypto for beginners". I really enjoyed those articles and it got to me see what makes up different blockchains and learn the underlying technologies. So I started looking out for various tokens and doing a little deep dive into them and writing articles about them. I came into the crypto world as a nobody who knew nothing and I received a lot of help along the way. So I wanted to pay it forward. I wanted to write articles that would help people or answer other people's questions. 

Because of me finding out about various tokens and cryptocurrencies I also found out that I could mine them and earn some of them. I quickly realized that I was outmatched and if I was going to mine something I needed to find something new and fresh and one that many people didn't know about so that I could mine a lot of them when they are cheap and then cash in when they eventually blew up in value. I tried the mobile ones like Electroneum and Pi. I tried mining XMR, LOKI, ETC, RVN, etc... I have done GPU mining. I have done CPU mining. I have done browser based Mining (like CryptoTab). I have done almost all kinds of mining. Shoot even Cloud mining. 

I wish I could sit here and tell you the best mining method for you. I can't because I can't tell the future. I can however tell you what I am doing right now and why I think is the best for me personally. I will always run my Theta node, which has a built in F@H client to also earn more rewards. So I earn TFUEL for staking, for enabling the F@H client and for relaying live video streams. I also GPU mine for RavenCoin. Running 2 low quality GPUs at it nets me about 20 RavenCoin a day so about $1 a day right now. The only faucets I really use now are the two bitcoin Alien mobile faucet apps (BCH and LTC) and TipNano. I have a feeling I will be doing those for a long time because well I like all 3 tokens and they don't take long at all to do them.

Now onto the games I play each day or each week:

Alien Worlds via https://play.pocketaliens.io/

Rising Star via https://www.risingstargame.com/

RollerCoin via https://rollercoin.com/ 

R-Planet via https://rplanet.io/staking

Koloboks via https://wax.kolobok.io/koloboks

Noise.Cash via https://noise.cash/ 

There are other games and such I 'play' but not on a regular basis and like say Upland.me. I check it maybe once a month to collect my rent and that's it.

I have also tried other writing platforms to earn crypto and I always come back to Publish0x. Not that others are not great or don't pay out. But for me I will stick to Publish0x and Noise.Cash. Publish0x has great writing contests and allows me to write articles like this. Noise.Cash allows me to express anything and everything in smaller articles or just "twitter update" type posts. I earn BCH from Noise.Cash and various tokens from Publish0x depending on the tipping tokens. 
I have amassed 1,205 followers on Publish0x and 633 on Noise.Cash. Getting followers on Noise is semi easy because the more people you follow the more people might follow you so that you all can tip each other. Getting followers on Publish0x for me was way harder. It was an uphill battle that I was constantly fighting.

Some of you are probably aware that I also like to dabble into NFT creation. I made a few original NFT's 

After a while I got burnt out on making all of them and also creating the thousand of NFT's cost me a lot of WAX haha. So I took a hiatus. Then recently I felt burnt out on other things and unmotivated. I remembered how fun it was when I first started making NFT's. So I got back into it but I also created a new schema this time around. I wanted it to be 100% me and not copying any format before me. So I created 'Crypto Cards'.

Here are some I created so far. They are square NFT's all created off on 1 cryptocurrency.

With my new NFT collection I am giving them away on my Noise.Cash account. So if you want to be in on the action follow me over there : https://noise.cash/u/TrocProcLock 

I made a conscious decision about 2 years ago, before I got on Publish0x but was getting into Crypto. I was never going to spend $1 USD on crypto. Everything I had in crypto was going to be earned online digitally. And I am glad to say that I have stuck to that. There are a few reasons why I choose that path but the one that I think applies the most is FOMO. I have seen it so many times here where a coin goes to the moon and people are regretting now buying more of it when it was low. And I also have seen so many times when a certain crypto tanks and people loose hundreds and thousands of their investment. I didn't want to deal with that. I wanted everything I had as a gain. Since I didn't put any money into the game then I can't be sad if I loose it all. I can only be happy when there is a balance on it.

That is an over simplification of it but that is it in a nutshell.

Upon looking back at I have had 3 WTF moments.

1) The day I say that I had over 10,000 TFUEL I went to CoinGecko and checked to see how much it was worth. At the time it was worth around $0.60 per coin. So that was over $6,000 worth of TFUEL. I almost fell out of my chair. Because of the Theta Wallet I never knew the value of all my tokens and I never took the 2 minutes to check manually. However I did that day and I was flabbergasted. It has since lost a lot of value due to staking being enabled and other things but it started to clime back up.

2) The day I got that FORTH airdrop I freaked out. I had like $6,000 worth of token one morning out of nowhere. I quickly went to convert it to ETH and it since had gained more and more value. I couldn't believe it and waiting for the FORTH to sell for ETH was the scariest 2 hours of my life haha. I couldn't believe someone would give me tokens worth thousands of dollars. And without Publish0x I would have never had Ampleforth and been available for the airdrop.

3) The day the price of TLM skyrocketed. I was playing Alien Worlds for a few months and had a couple thousand TLM. I was at the time staking it all on the planet Neri so I could potentially earn from Banano NFT's. At the time the only use for TLM was shining your NFT's and it wasn't worth it to me. So I stockpiled my TLM. I quickly unstaked my TLM which was a 2 day process. It was a super long 2 days. I was just hoping the price staying high long enough for me to unstake and sell off a lot of it. The price did stay high and I think I sold about 2,000 TLM for WAX. I can't remember the USD value but it was hundreds of dollars. I have since reinvested a lot of that WAX into other things.

My ride on the Crypto Train has been crazy to say the least. I have zero regrets so far and I plan to keep it that. I have learned a lot and as someone who works in IT the crypto space always interested me. I love learning new things and seeing how the world works in this completely unregulated (sort of) area. I think the sky is the limit for crypto.

If I had to give advice to someone knew to Crypto I think this would be it:

Do your homework and ask questions. I am a diehard Theta fan and backer because it has a future. It solves a real world problem and has proven it can fix the issue. It's the same way I love Brave Browser. It solves a real world problem. Those are the cryptos that will be around forever. I can't say the price of either will skyrocket and make you a millionaire but the tokens will be around for the long term. I can't say the same for the like of other tokens like Ethereum or DOGE.