I @anonymint boarded the train during the height of the pump so most of my earnings came from the 50% of payouts in SBD that can be cashed out immediately. And because I wrote some posts which were about some technical aspects that were very in tune with what was on some of the whales' mind at the time, so they upvoted me. And this I think caused curation bots to upvote me, because they saw that other whales were. And of course I owe probably at least 33 - 50% of that to @smooth's gracious upvotes, but afaik he only upvoted that which he felt was worthy content (and he upvoted a lot of content, not just mine). I have also returned the favor by stating clearly that I think @smooth has invested in trying to make Steem work. That he wasn't complicit in any plan to do a sneaky mine. And I also commended him on being resourceful and mining ~2% of Steem during the sneakymine when the rest of us were asleep.

So all-in-all, I guess it was a ROI from being around for 3 years doing unpaid technical research on crypto. And the fact that some people know I really, really needed the help. And some decent writing from me (although nothing to brag about).

Perhaps also very minorly because by participating instead of complaining, I think it was perceived as I was helping to move more adoption or investment towards Steem. In fact I may moved more investment into Steem than I took out (yet I have no way to measure that), although at no time was I trying to deceive anyone. Was just the way the ball bounced as we were all learning in the heat of the moment.

@jl777 earned a lot more than that and he only boarded a week or two before I did. Those who were blogging from the start ended up with $100,000+ at the peak.

Edit: read this also: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1567519.msg15828614#msg15828614