One thing that keeps me happy about my Steem investment
As some of you may be aware, I've been into crypto for quite a long time already. As a student who knew what he was researching and saw where this was heading but never had much extra fiat to invest, it has been a painful road of mistakes, bear markets and selling too early filling you with regret. The last point was the worst one and I wouldn't wish it to my worst enemies.
One of the few ways I could participate in this technology was through mining, even if that meant having to sacrifice a lot of gaming time for my two GPU's it was fun watching the numbers on certain coins go up and even more fun watching their value go up over time. It truly felt like something magical was happening and I was there from the beginning to see it all come to fruition. Like the gambler's fallacy though, most people are not going to tell you about the bad things of this technology. The lose of sleep, loss of relationships and your past life. I've always had an addictive personality but I figured it'll be worth it this time around in the long run so I jumped head first into it.
Something I remember quite well and which inspired me to write this post was that during the short bear markets that occurred at the time if you hadn't sold at the top for fiat (which would've brought tax implications) only thing left to do was try and trade your way up and this was one of the biggest mistakes that I learned too late from. You can't beat bots at daytrading so don't even try. Sure I've learned a lot from that over the years and have spread out my trades a lot more but, if you happened to attempt to live off of your crypto rewards there was only one thing you could do at the time. Either sell for fiat (Tether didn't exist) or trade your way to as little losses as possible. Either way it meant spending the crypto that had taken you months of electricity and mining power.
With Steem on the other hand, if you wanted to you could live off of the rewards you generate here weekly. Yes, I do understand that the bear markets for Steem and most altcoins in the past year have been absolute dogshit, but depending on your location and if you indeed do rely on your Steem income to live off of it, technically you could without having to power down. Even if you powerdown some cause you're just in that early phase and didn't manage to earn or buy enough at lower prices and find yourself to have to sell some now when the time is to buy, it's still not the worst case scenario cause you're either helping distribution and you know you have another ~20 years of Steem inflation ahead. Which could mean that in the long haul, or when you find the time to actively Steem again and you haven't been a complete douche to other Steemians, they will welcome you back later.
Any of you in this situation where you have to sell because it would be too difficult in your life not to? Aside from having sold at the top, how do you think you could've better prepared for this and how do you compare if your investment hadn't been Steem but a coin that only rewards its miners instead?
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for sharing this with us. To me, as an old time Forex trader, I began to touch crypto at the very late stage(still early today actually). I never believe in fair chance to anything around the world. For a few things I learned after I started to touch crypto.
A friend of mine started tapping his iPhone 3 screen to mine coins. I was the one standing beside him laughing out loud saying I get more points playing Tetris
Until the friend took out 27 coins, sold them all and splurge all on a lunch, I can really see the magic happening, but decided it was too much hassle to even earn for a lunch.
I did not do anything to my crypto business, until I registered a Steem account, and the upvote (I call it LIKE back then) come back with curation reward of 0.044sp in value. I got a shock and finally understand
I know now, people still mine BTC because it became a rare "mineral". We know why these graphic cards become so expansive now, because it's no longer Ethereum, they're now called "Unobtaineum". I am not referring to UNO, but yeah they're one of them. People literally having trouble to continuously buy BTC because the HODLING power so strong from everywhere around the world. This leave me some room for conclusion.
Old time miner, no doubt they get the easiest job, but due to lack of interests, many of them already left the scene and never bother to check back their investments. 27 coins for a meal, my friend having trouble to use the toilet nowadays.
Price fall after mining, it's not like if they care. Whatever paid on the operating costs has been written off. Crypto is already a form of digital asset. It's not like you care if your same amount of money in the bank keep on diminishing due to inflation?
Other than investors and miners, there's the last portion of people we call them whiner. They know absolutely what is going to be their risk, they just like tp whine. Price too high, whine unable to sell. Price too low, whine unable to survive. Price at the middle, whine no profit.
To summarize it, I don't think I can make things right. It's the same greed and fear from any financial tools despite crypto being the new young brother. If the invested coins are only good for miners? It's overly relying on "production", in the end it become North Korea. If I really have no choice had to sell some of my crypto? Life is always a choice, bite the bullet and make the hard decision and never look back. Remember my 27 coins lunch friend, every time he goes toilet he feel pain in his butthole. Whatever price it is, if I had no choice, then sell it because no choice left. If there's any remotely possible reason to not sell, hell no don't touch my assets 😂
Cheers
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I bought most of my coins and only got i to daily blogging a couple weeks ago. I was posting weekly before then.
If anything the crash made me more i terested because blogging and the when lambo crowr don't mix well and there is only so much speculation I want to read about. I like Steemit because it is interesting. It's like a very expensive newpaper or sns subscription for me. The price keeps people motivated and in theory helps with quality.
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Steem offers an excellent model. It is why I am such an advocate for it. Looking at other blockchains tells me how special this place is. There is the opportunity for people come in and make some headway. In spite of the problems we have, people can succeed here. Obviously, success is a relative term but people, with persistence, will see their accounts grow. This will be evident the next bull run.
I'm hoping @ocdb will do a good job for the growth of as many smaller accounts as possible.
You've managed to sum up most of my feelings about the crypto world in this post.
I think the biggest problem with mining is that we always see it in present value terms. Right now most miners struggle to break even, but's that's assuming they sell what they mine at current prices... If one is able to absorb the costs of mining now, and sell the fruits of those labours four or five years down the line, then suddenly it becomes very profitable indeed!
I am a crypto noob. However I am not a Wall St noob. When I started here, I could not believe people invested fiat into crypto. I was certain at the time I should take out half of all I earned. I did that and kicked myself as Steem began to moon! However on the way down, it has lessened the blow somewhat. I never powered down a penny although I thought about coz I would get angry with the way Ned was acting. Now I am powering up. I dont have but 5k SP. No way I am selling here. I will go down with the ship at this point if it comes to that.
Hehe I feel the same way in most of what you just wrote.
To not chase hype. One big thing this bear market has taught me is to not hodl projects that have not use case. If I can't spend the coin and I can't use it somehow to make my life better, then the only point of having it is to one day sell it in the future for a profit and that is almost impossible in a bear market.
It's nice to see all these dapps websites because that is where most of my time is going to be spent in the future is investing in projects that have something that improves my life somehow either through enjoyment or use cases such as purchasing goods.
I'm lucky that I don't have to sell crypto and will only be selling some in the future to protect my gains from the next bear market because this has been one terrible ride down.
For me steemit is a great platform and I would not change it for anything, despite being low, it is very helpful, it really is great help to all Venezuelans ... so I have no complaints about steemit ... I love it . :)
Too bad I am one in this category. Situations make me sell my Steem which I naturally would not have sold in this current bear market. But a man gotta do what he's gotta do to survive.
I was so skeptical of STEEM & Steemit when I first got involved. Now as I watch all the dApps and different projects build on the STEEM blockchain it's slowly becoming one of my favorite projects.
I always liked the idea of what STEEM and Steemit were trying to accomplish so I told myself I'd never power down unless we got like Facebook big. Still pretty much feel that way, but a little upset I didn't power down a little when my account was worth several thousand dollars. I may change my attitude on powering down in the future now.
I with the exception of Technical Analysis and market sentiment there really isn't a lot of ways to prepare yourself for crypto markets. I think one of the best things about Steemit however, is that it's more of an investment of time verse system resources and energy costs with coins that only reward miners or stakers. With Steemit you get out of it, what you put into it most of the time. I think that's what makes it unique!
Imagine if this is what the markets want you to do so it would improve distribution. :D
Interesting thought for sure.
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Highly rEsteemed!