Everyone surviving the crypto bloodbath? I was going to do another blog on crypto news but it got depressing reading all those articles. My title was a joke though this is a place for optimism!

Crypto will never die.

The mainstream media and all the crypto haters want you to think the end is coming, but crypto is how people pay for their dark web market drugs. It has a use for transactions right there. Those markets get shut down but new ones pop up and the overall market for online drugs grows. So it will exist as long those markets do. No one ever talks about this, or they want to distance themselves from the illegal aspects of cypto, but the reason Bitcoin was a success was the Silk Road.

Ma and pa middle America may take all their investment out, lots of people are going to quit and take a big loss. Not me though. I followed the common sense rules, nothing I invested was money I need to eat or pay rent. If I lost it all I would survive. I can afford to wait, I can wait years. Steem is up from when I joined, Bitcoin is up massively from when I first bought some, people just look at everything being down from December, but ignore the big picture.

I invest in things like Steem not to make a quick buck but to store value for a later date. If you are doing it for a part time income, or worse your sole income, you could be in trouble. When it's up it's great but you have to prepare for times when Steem is low. I don't try and make money now, I just keep socking more steem away for the future. If it stays low in value for a long time I will see that as an investment opportunity, I think it is undervalued and the 5 dollar plus days we saw before will come back.

Things I notice about Steem lately

• we get part of the payout in Steem now in addition to SP and SBD. This is great, one of the best changes ever. For a site called Steemit, Steem was hardly being used. I spent SBD for transactions and all the Steem stayed SP. Now you can build up Steem that is liquid and ready to trade. Make us more like a "Normal" crypto. I think this will increase the amount traded daily.

• Bid bot votes suck. Check out https://steembottracker.com/ they all give shitty returns now. I didn't mind doing it when you got most of your SBD back, but I'm not doing it at a big loss. Like you pay 10 SBD and the vote they give you is worth 14?

• On the other hand the whole Shark School thing about buying hundreds of dollars of votes to get in trending or hot was kind of lame, maybe the bid bots giving really bad returns is an answer to that. I know I am sick of seeing this guys face in trending:

https://steemit.com/@chbartist

When I see his face like 5 times in trending, I have to say, I am agreeing with Bernie Saunders that some of the shit in trending is garbage. It is only there because those people bought votes. Shitposts should be downvoted. If the vote buying is now a big losing proposition I blame the people abusing it. There was shit wrong with the upvote system. Someone could buy a few hundred dollars worth of upvotes and make it to trending where they can make enough votes there that it would not be a loss, even with curation. Now you will lose out on every purchased vote. You can still get some exposure, but you can't do it over and over at a profit anymore. That was reward pool rape seeing shitposts in trending because people dropped a bunch of SBD on bots, and then just kept reusing the same SBD's week after week.

• I still think the biggest problem with Steem is not the whale circle jerk voting system that awards people for being on an autovote list, I think the biggest probablem is the layout and organization. It needs more than New/hot/trending/promoted. I wish I could organize the people I follow into lists.

• A better more Reddit like layout where people who didn't even have accounts yet come because they are interested in the subject matter. Shouldn't that be the goal? Content that people want to read, that they share themselves. It seems like something that should basic fundamental for a site like this, but we are far from that. We have paid for content at the top, not the best content. I am on the internet a lot and I rarely see anyone anywhere link to a Steemit article. The only time I ever see it is people trying to promote their own blog. Great posts should go viral, people other than your mom should be sharing them. Steem blogs rarely get noticed on the internet, if they were better they would be. The best would be if your blog got clicked on by a bunch of non Steemians and you got some reward for that. I posed one on Reddit once and it got a few hundred views but only a few cents in upvotes. Your blog could get a million views but still make 10 cents, that seems wrong. Bringing people to the site should get you something. Referrals would be cool too...

• Many features of Steemworld should be incorporated into Steem. A better notification system when someone upvotes you or comments for instance.

• A little symbol beside a commenters name that shows he follows you.

• Still a lot of people come here because they think its like Facebook that pays. While that is technically true I think it's more like Youtube for payouts, successful channels make good cash but the majority of videos no one watches. If your Youtube vids don't get views the onus is on you to make them better and more popular. No one quits and says it's not fair.

• Upvoting your own comments is lame. If you get 10 full upvotes a day you should do 10 blogs and self upvote them all. At least then you did something. The other day I had a comment on my bog and it was like "nice blog" or some other cut and paste comment, and a huge self upvote. So I peaked at his other comments and they were all shit comments with big self upvotes. He didn't even blog himself, and he rented delegation. So I snitched to Steemcleamers, they pay you to report to them too. Its another way to make money here, while making Steem better. Everyone complains Steem sucks but they haven't done anything to make it better.

So many ways to make money here

• posting
• commenting
• upvoting and resteeming for curation
• delegate your SP, that is getting paid to do nothing
• win contests
• buy Steem when cheap and sell it when expensive.

I guess I will always see bitching and complaints on here. You need to adapt to Steem, it's not going to change for you.

Steem Charts

Image source: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/

My Steem stats

I was going to post yesterday (April 1st) a post keeping track of my stats but couldn't make it, so here is how I look for 04/01

My Steem stats April 1 2018

957 SP

Reputation 60.020

Followers 1,079

100% vote 0.10

Post Count 239 posts | 2945 comments

Curation
All Time 8.80
Last 30 Days 1.74

STEEM - $1.39
SBD - $1.40

Estimated Account value - $1,463.59