How Splinterlands participation led to real life improvements for me and my wife

So I have a life story - just what @goldmatters was looking for the other day on twitter - where by participating in Splinterlands has led to a real and specific improvement in our daily lives.

Here is the tweet thread for those of you interested -

https://twitter.com/EcoInstant/status/1699805809406804162

The story actually starts a bit before this. I missed out on alpha and beta, I am slow and nervous when it comes to new projects, I generally stick to what I know. But when the Untamed Kickstarter came out, I did pull the trigger and dumped about 2700 dollars into it, which was a lot for me at the time. Some people even told me I was crazy - I put the deal on paypal credit, and paid it off over time.

Turns out it was the best investment I have ever made. But not right away.

I opened up some of the packs, I combined some of the cards - into gold level deck, and I played the ranked play game for a bit. I earned some tokens, I earned some cards, and when renting started I got some income from there as well.

As I learned the Splinterlands ecosystem, the first real trade I did was for these bad boys - furious chickens and golden chickens.

This become somewhat of an interesting point of discussion with my wife and I. During this time, she was also into chickens, the fattening kind, some version of rock hens. We had just came back to the farm after living 6 months in Florida with grandma after she broke her hip.

Here you can see me running them around the farm for exercise.

So while I was buying 30 golden chickens for 4-7 dollars as they were going out of print, she was fattening some real chickens. I ended up selling most of the golden chickens for more than 200 dollars each, and from then on my wife seemed to understand something about NFTs, or at least give me a little more leeway in our discussions about my 'job'.

I still have 1 golden chicken left, I don't think I will ever sell him. Some memories are worth more than money.

Bull run

So in the last bull run, during the pandemic, I suddenly noticed that my Splinterlands card collection was worth more than 60,000 USD! Wow, I thought, this is a crazy amount of money. We had had our eye on a piece of land next door to ours for a few years, since it connected our land to the local river heading down the mountain.

I decided to start pruning out my cards, and listing them for sale. During this time, I took out as much as 30k usd from just Splinterlands cards, plus I think I was probably selling SPS during that airdrop period.

I don't have good records of everything, but what I do know is that we paid $27,000 for 3 hectares of farmland adjacent to ours, and doubled the size of our farm.

Above you can see our original farm, and now we have all the way down to the river, visible in the lower right corner, somewhat under the map legend. Another benefit to owning all the way down to the river is that we don't have to worry about someone else possibly using the land in such a way to cause lots of erosion, and possibly threatening our farm higher up.

And here you can see a shot of shortly after we bought it, we inherited with the property two old dudes growing stuff on it, I made a deal with them and they have been slowly turning the cultivated lots over to us as the harvests are finished. You can read more about my mindset at that time with this post: How much should I squeeze?

Part of it was already turning into a forest by itself - natural restoration, and we have begun some forestry experiments in those areas already, going on 2 years now. Here is a video I recorded from one of these places on the new land:

All of these things were possible with our participating in Splinterlands. To us it is more important the real life successes than big numbers on the internet, but participating in these digital realms has allowed us to expand what we are doing in the real world.

And Splinterlands has surely been the best of the bunch. Its been a long haul so far, and it seems like once again we are in a bear market, where no one is thinking that number will go up, maybe ever again.

But we still have some exposure, after all this time, we are ready to ride another wave and see what happens. And Splinterlands is a big part of that. I will be managing a region called Pandon Reach, and you are invited! Let's play along, and see what these digital worlds can do for our real lives - again.

Freedom and Friendship