Nice one Matt. That's some hard working ethos. I've also never powered down and have got to my 6000+ SP naturally, with a little boost from working as a curator for curie (finders fees are paid to curators at curie for accepted posts).

To be honest, I would've loved to put my hard earned liquid earnings towards BTC as the tokens have diverged, but I didn't.

I related to what you said about having doubts in what I've done. When I was really hammering the (curie) curating during 2017, many curators we're making $80-100/week worth of steem and quite sensibly cashing it out. I chose to power it up... and when I think about it, I wish I had dollar cost averaged it out and kept 50% held in a stable coin to buy back now. I'd be an orca if I'd done that. But I hope that my work ethic at least gets me some props with some people on here.

For those faithful detail-oriented followers who read my posts,

Ha ha, well you've hit on something that concerns me about steem, and what will see me leaving if anything pushes me to it. I suspect I've less people reading my content now than a year ago. This is a problem for me, as I'm a professional freelance writer. Right now, it would be a better ($ + audience) option for me to focus on tailoring my writing for the audience on medium.

But.... I'm stubborn as hell, and maybe that'll prove a good thing in the long run 🙂

That's less than $55 to check the box that all 5K Steem Power I'll be keeping staked is 100% manually earned.

Nearly there! Here's my $0.09 100% vote to chip a fleck off that total 😆