I Give Up.

One of my former tenants used to pay me in Bitcoin. I liked it--made me feel all anarchistic. Plus, those coins (this was two years back) have turned out to be what you might call a serious overpayment--BTC was trading in the $600 range at the time.

I cashed out most of them when I got them, because frankly I needed the money, but I kept about half a Bitcoin in my Coinbase wallet kind of by accident. When BTC challenged the $3k mark a month and a half ago, I remembered. That was a pretty good day. Not every day you find a $1400 bill in your pocket.

This time, though, I was involved in this niche project called Steemit. I was blogging here once in a while, putting in my time, doing some curation work, writing, that kind of thing. Not on a daily basis, but once in a while. Then I thought, "hey, I have this money nobody knows about and my wife can't give me that look for blowing. Why don't I move some over to Steem?"

So I did. Just like a tenth of a Bitcoin. But I picked up 200SP for it, and that was delicious. I settled down to put some hard farming in to get up to the magic 500SP level and get my slider. I blogged in a disciplined, mature fashion, with original content, promoting a lot of other Steemians (Best of Steemit has now promoted well over a hundred other accounts, by my reckoning), following good people, commenting, you know, all the hard work you gotta do to be prosperous.

Steem responded by losing 69% of its value in a month. My lovely voting power went from .20 down to .10. The reward pool shrank like a puddle in summer, such that where my goal used to be to have five posts in a row over $5, now I'm trying to have at least every other post make a buck. Gathering Steem? Ha. I had a plan for when I'd get to the magical 500, and every day that date pushed back.

So much work. SO MUCH WORK. Hundreds of hours, taken from other projects that actually seemed to love me, only to watch my SP needle tick up .005 for curating a post that made eleven cents. It's all too much.

So today I gave up. I went over to Coinbase, cashed out another .1 BTC and powered it up. Presto! 638SP, suckas!

Look, I'm all in here. All. In. This is not a blog site, someplace I post now and then. This is home. I'm going to be here for a long time, and I want my eggs in this basket, with @johnjgeddes and @redhen and @aggroed and @rhondak and @gmuxx and @smuggly-sparrow and @jayjayjeffrey and @jrhughes hundreds on hundreds of others (I follow a lot of people). The price of Steem is only a buying opportunity, not a value judgment. I love the work I do here, and especially the work all of you do. So it's time to buy, and weld the outer door shut on the airplane. We're not bailing. Not ever.

Now, if you'll pardon me, imma go use my power slider. A LOT.

~Cristof

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^{MINNOWS GOTTA SCHOOL}
Cristof supports the Minnow Support Project and all its lovely denizens.