Hello Steemit! Introduction post.

Hey folks, I've been using Steemit for a little under a month and I decided it was time to introduce myself. I spent my childhood years, ages 4-17, living on a rural island with about 2k year-round residents. The island focused on agriculture and tourism, plus construction to supply the latter, so those were the jobs I worked growing up. I now live in a large city and have for several years. I'm interested in a wide variety of topics and activities: Physics, Chemistry, Aerospace Engineering, Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Cryptography, Logistics, Environmental Sciences, Computer and Tabletop Games, Game Design, 3D Modeling, Art of all kinds, Sailing, Hiking, and other things of this sort. I'll be occasionally posting on these but if you post regularly on any of those topics feel free to indulge in a bit of shameless self promotion and comment so I can follow you!

Now here is the story of how I came to Steemit for any who are interested. I used to run BOINC on my desktop back in 2004, then stopped for a couple years after I had to downgrade to a weak laptop. Flash forward to February 2017, I have a decent desktop and because of aforementioned various interests my curiosity about cryptocurrencies peaked. I looked into trying to mine or buy bitcoin. Mining was out of the question and unfortunately local law in my area requires crypto exchanges to be licensed by the local government (pretty sure Casinos have something to do with this, there have a lot around here) so all the exchanges I looked into turned out to be illegal to use in my area. This is the point where I began looking into alt-coins, specifically ones I could mine easily. I wasn't interested in cryptocurrency for profit, simply to learn about it and the computer science behind it, so alt-coins were fine for me. I then stumbled upon Gridcoin.

A cryptocurrency built to reward BOINC computations. I instantly became an avid researcher, dedicating any old or spare home computers to the pool and interacting with the Gridcoin community, even seeing my wallet grow to be worth whole tens of dollars. Which finally lead me here, another place where you don't need $1000s of graphics cards or investment capital to participate in the future of money that is cryptocurrency. Hopefully local laws change soon and I can abandon my silly national currency more than I already have.

So here I am! Looking forward to seeing cryptocurrencies revolutionize the world. Thanks for reading! If you liked my post please consider leaving an upvote and resteeming.