Living in the virtual crypto world too long and sometimes we forget the actual purpose of cryptocurrencies, to actually use it for buying services or products.

I’ve been participating in the space for mlre than a year now. Other than coin-to-coin trading, is the list of things that I’ve purchased via coins, mainly in Steem of course:

• VPS service from @privex. I’m on the most basic 8 USD plan for the third month and I must say I’m a happy customer with the server’s stability. This service is priced at USD but converted to crypto amount during checkout. They only receive crypto such as BTC, LTC, STEEM/SBD.




• Burger, the real edible burger! Absolutely amazing feeling feeding my stomach with some virtual digital STEEM! If you ever bought food using crypto you will know what I’m talking about: https://steemit.com/steem/@fr3eze/feeding-my-stomach-with-steem-for-the-first-time




• Graphic design service for a logo. I managed to hunt down a talented designer @ggabogarcia to design a complete Steem profile for my sub account @zocken which is focusing on sharing gaming content. This is how I did it and you may proceed to the @zocken for to see the result for yourselve. Paying SBD for awesome service like this feels unreal indeed!




• Paid for food a couple of time after Steem meet-up with SBD. Things has became easier if the group have something in common to believe. One person settle the bill for the table with credit card, and the rest pays him with STEEM/SBD. Simple as that.




• Bought a Trezor hardware wallet with BTC This is literally my first time of paying crypto for physical product for the first time. Though I spend the precious BTC right before the boom of December 2017, that was a pleasure shopping experience.

Guess I have been paying STEEM for more stuff such as buying virtual items like SteemMonster card packs and playing dice games in the SteemDice. Both are purely for entertainment purpose so I would not rather count them as buying real value product with the money.

All in all, it feels great and practical to be able to actually spend the coins I’m earning everyday. This alone spells the greatest value of a cryptocurrency to me and I shall keep looking for new ways for its usage.

TLDR: Paid VPS, burger, graphic design service and a couples of other stuff using STEEM/SBD and it feels great.

太长没读： 这些日子，用过 STEEM/SBD 买了 VPS，logo 设计服务，食物等等真实世界的东西，感觉好极了。你有买过什么吗？

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Byteball network down

Thanks to the ultra active Steem community, Byteball is probably undergoing the heaviest stress test the network never experienced before right after the announcement of Steemian attestation.

Fund sending in Byteball and the Steem attestation bot is all halted currently since yesterday afternoon.

3k of successful Steem attestation

To be exact, it is 3160 Steem attestors currently which you can check at https://byteball.co/attestors.

Given over a million of registered users on Steem and over 50k active uaers everyday, 3160 Steem attestors seems negligible and in the other words it means there are a LOT of pending attestation due to the congested traffic.

Network expected to be up again in a few days

According to the admins from official Byteball Telegram channel, this issue is something never experienced before and the expected resolve time could be few days.

You can follow the Byteball Slack chat for technical updates as well.

Be patient if your transaction or attestation is not going through right now. It will be resolved soon as the devs already working hard on it.

I see this as a good thing in long term

You do not improve a product without first breaking it. Current issue will strengthen Byteball integrity ar the cost of temporary downtime. Not to mention it is proven to be a great promotion to all Steemians, anyone is not aware of Byteball yet?

If you are the first-time user, send me your Byteball address following this (post)[https://steemit.com/steempress/@vornix/bestcryptostorycontestwithatotal6sbdprize-a1wwiauon6] and I shall cover your registration fee for free.

However, request will be denied if you have asked for Bytes giveaway from others. No Bytes-hunting here.

TLDR: Byteball network is currently unworkable and expected resolved time would be within a few days. Be pateint for the Steem attestation.

太长没读：Byteball 网路目前处于停止状态，Steem 认证和转账等功能一并不能使用。程序人员已经着手解决问题，消息指出数日内应该可以恢复正常。还没认证的朋友们请耐心等候。

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This is the best news I’ve ever received since the day of holding Byteball. If you never heard of this cool project, I’ve done a brief introduction why it is a great one to join and you can read it here.

Byteball decided to join Steem and do a massive airdrops to the Steemians. It means free money to everyone regardless of your SP, it is based on the account reputation. Sounds even cooler right!

Read more about the post from Byteball’s guy:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@punqtured/official-byteball-airdrop-to-steemians

What to do?

• Download a Byteball wallet(referral link): https://steem-byteball.org/#RRY2EIQ72SZRYTXLYOXM6CVZ2W7WZJ4T
• Put your Byteball wallet address in the comment below and I will send yous some FREE Bytes to start with.
• Receive 0.0006 GByte from me and you can use it for registration fee.
• Follow the detailed steps stated in the official post: https://steemit.com/steemit/@punqtured/official-byteball-airdrop-to-steemians
• Done. Enjoy the free Byteball from airdrops!

今天 Byteball 雪球决定在 Steem 这个平台上大派糖果！只要用 Steem 的身份认证就可以得到免费的雪球。更好的是，空降的份量不看 SP 的持有量，而是声望。这下可好了，人人有份啊！

如果没听过雪球是什么，可以读一读我之前写过的帖子。

照着以下简单步骤:

• 下载雪球钱包（Referral link): https://steem-byteball.org/#RRY2EIQ72SZRYTXLYOXM6CVZ2W7WZJ4T
• 把雪球地址留言在下面，我会免费给你一点 Bytes 作为认证用费。
• 收到来自我的 0.0006 GBytes。
• 跟着官方指南开始认证: https://steemit.com/steemit/@punqtured/official-byteball-airdrop-to-steemians
• 成功领取免费糖果！

Images credit to Coindrift.io

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Decided to share my gaming experience but not wanted to mix it up with the focus of current account, the best way is to set up another account and do all the gaming related stuff there.

This is how @zocken is born. It will be my first sub account on Steem serving the purpose of the very slogan “Gaming is everything”.

Set up a proper theme for it

I wanted to start to theme the @zocken in to a pure gaming account with proper logo, cover photo and banner. I know my main account don’t even care to have a cover photo. This tends to be a experimental move to build a brand of a Steem account.

Talent hunting on Steem

So I wanted to hire someone professional to do the design for this new gaming account, and best if I can find someone here in Steem so that the service could be paid via SBD.

I heard that Steemgigs is the market site build for this exact purpose, people are selling all kinf of services for SBD. It is like a Fiverr on Steem, except it sucks. Page took ages to load and ugly site design, gave me cancer surfing at it.

Utopian could be a way out

I recalled the day of seeing great logo artwork under the graphics design categories in Utopian-io, why not trying my luck there? Only to find out Utopian has taken their site down due to the last cyber attack. Oh no. But there must be some workarounds.

Eventually, searching through tags like graphics design or simply search within Steemit site with keywords.

Then I found this guy @ggabogarcia. Picture says a thousand words, let’s see what he brought to me in the end.

Logo

Cover photo

Banner

Amazing works, aren’t they?

Absolutely stunning job and you can view the real demonstration at @zocken. I can’t speak highly enough of him. Professional output, fluent communication, complete packaged delivery and worked beyond my expectations.

If you ever need a Steem profile design or any other design related matter, and wish to pay with STEEM/SBD, give @ggabogarcia a ping. You would be happy if you did it.

TLDR: Found a talented graphic designer on Steem and he did deliver a top-notch quality work for my sub account. And he accepts STEEM/SBD for tge service too. Highly recommended.

太长没读: 为了给小号设计一个形象，在 Steem 上找了个非常专业的设计家，作品输出质量远远超越了我的期望。最重要的是他接受 STEEM/SBD 的付费。有需要的朋友们不要错过啦。

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After getting the monstrous GTX 1080, investing in some great games from the last Steam summer sales, it is gaming time. Build there is a reason why I just decided to start my all-time favourite gaming after building up my gaming rig for a year?

I knew I wasn’t ready to hug the privilege of gaming all day long without having to worry about everything else. I would gaming till the end of the world if only I could, believe me.

But the lack of security got the best of me

Putting food on the table(for myself), paying bills and all sorts of survival needs in the city keeps reminding me there are more important things which should get most of my attention currently. I know, gaming should be leisure and casual and maybe I just worried too much. But I find no fun in the process of enjoying something yet deep in my mind there is a voice keep telling me “it’s time to sleep you have to wake up early for work”.

Screw the morning alarm, screw the boss, screw the job. Nah, I’m just kidding. I will be sleeping on the street immediately after losing the job.

I can no longer indulge in the pure joy of gaming the way I gamed as a kid. I’m the only one who is feeing myself. Not to mention, I’ve spotted so many opportunities to strengthen the feeding ability after joining the crazy crypto world. To say the least, Steem could be in my top 5 list of best money-making tools.

Why not monetizing the leisure gaming?

Since everything is ready and there are no reasons to stop me from picking up the deeply loved gaming hobby, I have an idea to make the time-wasting activity less guilty. While gaming is consuming the content prepared by the game developer, why not record it down and share it out via brilliant Steem platform?

@dlive and @dtube was the first two application came to my mind with this idea, obviously. I know there are many who already live streaming their gaming experience or just record it down and share it afterwards. I just never thought of actually doing that myself.

Turn out that could be a really awesome idea. I could record the whole gaming process down and selectively trim it down to a meaningful clip. Not being an FPS, PUBG or Dota fan, I love to play single-player games and there are many big titles in this genre like the GTA 5, Witcher series, Dark Soul series just to name a few. I could share how to complete certain missions or just to show off some fancy battle scenes.

Even the audience is not the players of the same game, the ultra high graphics gaming playthrough can already be treated as a mini-movie.

And the best part is, those clips stand a chance to win some votes too! This is what I hope will compensate a little for the gaming guilt after all.

Alright, gaming + Dlive that’s the combo.

TLDR: Finally decided to start gaming while record the process down and share it on Steem via dlive or dtube just to earn a few extra bucks and reduce the guilty feeling of wasting time.

太长没读: 终于决定了捡起最爱的打机（打电动）爱好，把其中有趣的过程记录下来放在 Steem 上不只可以成为另一个内容输出，还可以有机会赚到些许点赞，罪恶感大大降低啊！

All images are taken from unsplash.com

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10AppsManager

Get rid of Windows 10 preinstalled bloatware

Screenshots

Hunter’s comment

Let’s take a look at preinstalled Store apps in the list. 3D builder, Food, Health, Get Skype, Maps, Money, Sway, Reader, bet you never open or even heard of those apps the whole time operation on the Windows 10!

Unfortunately, those bloatwares are installed together with the operating system and you cannot find them in the Uninstall Program list. Though the powershell commands do offer an alternative to get rid of those apps, it is no simpler than using 10AppsManager.

10AppsManager is a simple tool to uninstall/reinstall the bloatwares with just one click. I could not provide more picture because it has only one interface and that’s it. Work flawlessly and why you should reduce unwanted apps:

• Windows startup gets a lot quicker without having to load all these unnecesary apps.
• Gain extra CPU processing power(tested and proven myself.)
• Make your operating system truly yours with just a few clicks.

You don’t have to delete all of the apps. The rule of thumb is, delete whatever you never opened or did not even know they existed before. Keep those you actually know and use, I kept the Photos for instance.

Let’s keep the Windows 10 fit the way it should!

Link

https://www.thewindowsclub.com/10appsmanager-windows-10

Contributors

Hunter: @fr3eze

This is posted on Steemhunt - A place where you can dig products and earn STEEM.
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