Why I am powering up most of my liquid Steem and investing in Golos

Hello to all my followers!

I've been following the charts a bit lately and was trying to increase my liquid Steem by trading (and even managed to increase it by a little bit) but today I decided to withdraw them back to my account and power up. I should have added in the title that I will also be talking a little bit about my thoughts on the changes and how it could effect the future.

[Image from Pixabay - Changes]

This is partly because of the upcoming changes, even though I feel a bit unsure about the big decrease of inflation, mostly cause I myself haven't been able to use it to my advantage as much as others have who have been here since the start with a respectable amount of SP, but also for all the new investors who haven't just spent their time on the platform but also some of their monetary value with the inflation being 160%, but I will come back to this in my post shortly, for now I withdrew all liquid Steem I had and powered up. I thought I'd make good use of the inflation for a last week and because I believe in the future of this platform.

From my point of view, I understand the changes and I have acknowledged the inflation rate before and how it was way too high for the top 100 users who were active in curating/and or posting while powering down at the same time. A daily increase of 0.45-0.55% in SP when you were only able to withdraw under 1% of your vests a week didn't seem logical considering the stage where Steemit is at still, but with the new changes the daily % increase will be over 16 times lower. This means that currently SD guarantees a better inflation (20%) than Steem, unless the price changes dramatically over the coming months.

Considering some of the big transfers I have noticed going to poloniex lately, it seems as if most users are converting their SD to Steem knowing the inflation changes. This can obviously mean that they think Steem will go up in value over time with this new change in effect. It seems to me like the platform wants to somehow "wash" away the investors who have lost hope in it and want to get out no matter what the price, while at the same time giving power to the ones who have stuck with the platform through thick and thin and can buy in or earn more influence during the time after the hardfork. This could lead to some short-term price decline (when the 13 week withdraw rate comes into effect) but at the same time we will be able to notice when it hits the barrier of too few users divesting and demand increasing to invest in the platform with the possibility to cash out in 3 months. This barrier might come sooner than we think considering ned and dan said they won't power down at all for those 3 months.

Its going to be exciting 3 months, and what I will be doing during these 3 months is having a few bitcoins ready to purchase little by little, dump by dump. With this I mean buying during drops and not the newbie mistake people do when they "fear of missing out" buy assets and see them drop an hour later to panic and sell at a loss.

One thing that I would like to address and feel like more users share the same opinion about, is giving the investors who stay powered up or have stayed powered up for most of Steemits or their existence an edge to the ones powering down. Before this change there has basically not been any sort of penalty for powering down except that you lose the amount of vests you withdraw, users who already were in the top 1000 were gaining SP they could sell without caring too much about their investment cause it felt basically free since the inflation was so high. Seeing users who weren't even active in any way, but still had invested early to only continue to dump on the market week after week and their balances remaining relatively the same felt unfair to the users trying to increase their influence to better use this platform and influence it more.

I know there are many of you out there who came here after the payouts in July and wanted to power up as much as possible to both influence the site but also receive good amounts of inflation, but because you were buying in a declining price it was having a counter-effect to most users. "I purchased Steem at 3$ and was able to vote people up 10 cents at a time, now its worth 0.20$ and I can't change the posts payout from 0,00$" It has been some pretty dark times for those users, but I just wanted to thank everyone who have remained with the platform during those times. Especially the ones who remained positive and continued letting more people know about the platform and its technology instead of whining day in and day out about the price and spreading FUD like there is no tomorrow. I would hope the users who have been new and have remained powered up during these times would be rewarded in some way for it, but guess waiting it out and seeing the price change might be good enough of a reward for those that stick around after the next 3-4 months. (the months just for the divesting period for those who want to get out).

As small as a community we may be right now, I am happy to be a part of it. I browse posts a lot and so far I have to say it is INSANE how the platform is evolving in Originality and Quality. Even with incentives being rewarded with an asset that has been in decline, many have seen the opportunity and grabbed hold of it and are working hard developing for the platform. Those are the people we will have to thank once this platform becomes mainstream, those and the team of developers who have worked on Steemit.com and of course @ned the C.E.O. I have to say I binge watched most of his talks after writing the transcript and combine that with reading some of @dantheman's older posts and posts about bitshares, my mind was literally blown away. I recommend more users to do the same.

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On a side-note, the golos crowdsale is now open and I invested around 0.05 btc into it, might invest some more soon as it feels like a second chance at investing early into Steemit :P

Anyway, can't wait for the new changes and how it will effect the platform and who will be the true believers and who will remove their influence while new ones take their place in a volatile free market. And to all users who do good on the platform and continue to post great content:

Thank you! You are Steemit!

PS! What are your thoughts on the upcoming changes?