Hello! This is my first month in Publish0x, and in this article, I want to share my experience here, why I decided to do research on crypto, and why I ended up writing articles here, among other things.

To begin with, I'm 31 years old, I work as a web developer and I live in Argentina, a country with a very complicated economic situation that was partly the reason why I became interested in cryptocurrencies.

The economic situation of Argentina

This is a very broad topic that it would be better to cover in a separate article, but to summarize, Argentina is a country where the local currency is highly devalued compared to the dollar and where there's an annual inflation of around 40%. As if that weren't enough, the government imposes tough restrictions on the purchase of dollars in banks. This causes the existence of a "parallel dollar" also known as "blue dollar", which is the dollar that can be bought in exchange houses, and the price difference with respect to the official dollar is more than double.

So, in a country with an unfavorable economic situation and full of restrictions, what is the best way to invest and get some return on savings? Yes, you guessed it, crypto!

First experiences with faucets

I go to Reddit very often, and one day I found the sub r/beermoneyglobal, it's a sub where opportunities to earn some extra money are promoted. Looking at the posts, I found one that said "PipeFlare - Claim crypto with direct deposit". That was my first contact with crypto, but at the time I was very skeptical and thought it was a scam. Still, curiosity killed the cat. I went to the PipeFlare website and signed up, just to see if it was true that they were giving away free crypto. They recommend installing a wallet, but I remembered that I had a Coinbase account that I had never used, so I copied and pasted my Coinbase address into PipeFlare, and after a few minutes I got an email from Coinbase saying that they had deposited a certain amount of ZEC. Voila! It works! I can't believe it! Free crypto!

From here I started to have a little more confidence in crypto. And of course, the path didn't end here. Then I came across GlobalHive and ZenHub.

There were also some bad experiences. For example, in Coinpot I made 14 cents the first day (50 DOGE), and I had no better idea than to send them to Binance, just to test, but I found that with that small amount I could not do anything, I could not convert them to another currency, and neither I could withdraw them because the withdrawal fee was... 50 DOGE! How terrible! Then I left Coinpot because I didn't like to enslave myself by solving captchas every 5 minutes.

Learning about crypto: this is overwhelming!

Here begins the journey of learning about crypto. In Argentina, Spanish is spoken, but unfortunately, there is almost no crypto information in Spanish, especially in Argentina. In Reddit's Argentine subs people are reluctant to talk about crypto, I don't know if because of ignorance or something else. So the only thing I could do is go to web pages in English. I have no problem reading in English (I wouldn't be here otherwise), but I'm sorry there can't be a reliable source of information about crypto in my language. But this is not time to regret, it's time to learn.

At first, I thought the only cryptos were Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins, but... there are thousands of different cryptos! And more are emerging every day! So how am I going to learn so much in such a short time? Still, over time I learned that most cryptos are insignificant and only a few are worth it.

Meanwhile, I kept looking for ways to earn free crypto. I signed up for a bunch of faucet websites and my mailbox started to fill with spam from these sites, but most of the faucets I tested weren't profitable unless you have 1000 or more referrals, so I quitted and I only kept a few.

But not all are faucets. I discovered that there are also sites that pay crypto to perform the activities that a normal person does every day, such as watching videos or reading blog articles. This is how I got to Publish0x. I read and learned about crypto and other topics that were interesting to me, and by the way, I got some crypto thanks to the tips. But at the same time, I knew that this was something insignificant and that it was going to take a very long time to reach the minimum withdrawal. But that didn't matter to me, all I wanted was to learn.

The challenge of reading and writing in English as a second language

As I mentioned before, I have no problem reading English, but I was reluctant to write. My only English certification is the Cambridge University Preliminary English Test. It's a basic certification for conversational English that can be used, for example, to travel, go shopping, and take taxis in foreign countries, and little else. For most jobs, the First Certificate in English, or higher, is required.

For this reason, I always wanted to practice English well (it was some sort of pending debt to myself). At some point in the future, I would like to travel to English-speaking countries and get around without the need for guides or translators, so I needed to get my act together and start to practice as soon as possible.

This is why Publish0x and learning about crypto were the perfect excuse for that. 2 years ago I started a blog in Spanish about anime and Japanese culture, but after 1 month I got tired of writing and quitted. So, to practice the language, I decided to start a blog in English on Publish0x.

The only reason I'm doing this is learning, not money. On Publish0x writers can be tipped, and while there are people who make a lot of money here, most of them have been doing it for a long time, or have interesting projects... or both. So I knew in advance that tips won't be a significant source of income.

My first article was about Inktober, an ink drawing challenge during October. It received about 6 cents in tips, so I made up my mind that that would be the average amount of tips per article.

My second article was about Rocket League, a popular esport. It's a much shorter and simpler article, so it would get much fewer tips... or so I thought. After a while, I went to the dashboard to copy the article link and share it elsewhere, and literally, my reaction was this:

After this, I practically continued writing by inertia. Sometimes I write about crypto-related stuff and sometimes about other things I also like. I like Publish0x because it allows you to write about a lot of different topics without being tied to having a traditional monothematic blog on Blogger, WordPress, etc. I also tried read.cash but didn't like it very much, I'd better stay here.

So I want to thank all the staff and community at Publish0x for creating this place where you can blog and learn about crypto without any of the negative stuff from social media and other platforms. I don't know what the future will hold, I just know that I'll keep learning, keep reading, and keep writing.