Screw It. I'm Powering Up. #250 on the Rich List.
I spent months earning SBD with my posts. When I got above $500 worth, I started playing the internal market a bit. It was fun, and I learned a bit in the process. I'd sell on the spikes for STEEM and then buy back on the dips. Working with small amounts didn't really make a huge difference, but it was still fun. Recently, when the price got around $0.10, I sold all my SBD and bought STEEM. I figured I could buy back SBD at $0.12 or higher to make a nice little profit and increase my SBD holdings again.
Today, I figured...
Screw it. I'm just going to power this up.
The USD value of STEEM may keep going down. This may be a memory of a failed crypto investment. But I don't really care right now, because I also see the potential for the future.
There are now only 249 accounts on planet earth which have more Steem Power than I do.
#250
Can you imagine saying the same thing about bitcoin less than a year after it was invented?
I never thought I'd hit 250. I thought waves of new investors would flock into this crypto and bump everyone else down the list. 3 second confirmation times? 10's of thousands of transactions a second? Account recovery features? A built in, decentralized, censorship-resistant social media platform which pays users for creation and curation? What's not to love about this technology?!?
I don't understand why the market hasn't responded more enthusiastically. I don't understand why so many other cryptos are increasing in value right now and STEEM seems to be relatively ignored.
So I figured, screw it. I'll just power up and hope for a long-term return. This is some amazing technology, and I'm hopeful someday more people will recognize it as such and want to store their value here.
I guess I'll try building up my SBD balance again so I can keep learning on the internal market.
Care to join me?
I am sitting at 310, if only I took it serious when I signed up for my first account in June but we are on to something here Luke. The next six months will really tell us what the future holds. I hope when we meet some day that we can give each other a high five for sticking with the dream.
Sounds like a great plan to me. Maybe we can do it on our own private islands. Hahaha.
Or we'll be sad because others who come after us, far smarter, wiser and better funded, will buy up all the STEEM at $0.01 each or less, laughing all the way at the bank (along with the early miners who've been powering down this whole time). It's hard not to feel like a sucker when so many are cashing out week after week.
Oh well. If the price does go up, those who sold low will be sad too. :)
That's pretty awesome @lukestokes!
I'm looking at about 100 Steem that I'm about to power up with. I consider this an investment for the future and I'm holding onto it because...
I remember when 100 STEEM was quite a bit. Now it's about enough to buy lunch. heheh. How far we've come. Power that stuff up!
I was working through my crypto tax stuff and looked at my STEEM purchase amounts for 2016. Quite a discouraging loss there. It may look like a waste of BTC, but I've certainly enjoyed the community here, so it's not a total loss... yet. :)
If the price goes back up, I'll feel like a genius.
I probably won't be able to fly though, unless I can buy a plane with my STEEM winnings. :)
UGH - I can't even think about taxes for crypto. Thankfully I haven't made enough to worry about it...yet.
???
shakes head
Since I posted about paying my house off with bitcoin sales and the recent news of the government going after Coinbase (which I've used mostly since the fall of MtGox), I figure I have to keep paying their extortion fees unless I want to put my family and business at risk. Hopefully someday that will all change and we can voluntarily pay for services we want instead of funding the military industrial complex...
But I digress. I started playing around with https://bitcoin.tax/ today. Seems to work really well.
Thanks for the link. I'm adding it to favorites. After what my husband and I have gone through with idiots in government, double-speak and outright theft, this is the first time in our life that we've considered an expatriate living. Indeed - take care of your own assets.
I've certainly been thinking about it a lot lately also. I have a hunch if and when we do finally decide to live somewhere else where the weather is always nice and the purchasing power of the all-mighty dollar is appreciated, I'll wonder why we didn't go sooner. :)
For now, I think we're just going to save up and plan for some trips.
The reason Steemit is not taking off is the community. Technology in and by itself is amazing, but we live times when technology is incredibly easy to find and use. This is not a differentiator anymore. Look at Tendermint and Cosmos for a glimpse of what technology can do (spoiler: it's on par with Graphene).
What's really holding back the growth of Steemit/Steem is the sentiment created by frequent drama. That drama may or may not be justified or true, but it's there and it's affecting credibility. No one wants to buy in a company where shareholders are fighting all the time, flagging each others, abuse their power and so on. Imagine the same environment around Bitcoin in the early years...
Hard to tell if and when the drama will end, but if and when the drama will end, the price of Steem will start its well deserved journey to the Moon.
You may be right, but I'm not yet convinced. Like any social media platform, the value you gain out of it comes from the people you choose to follow. I've thankfully avoided most of the drama quite successfully. I've introduced a lot of people to Steemit and when I think through why they didn't stick around and continue posting, I think it's much more complicated than that. I'm thinking I might to a little survey and ask them directly, but many I have already talked to say they are just too busy to write things, but I also think it has to do with whether or not their friends are already here (they aren't). The network effect is a huge hurdle to overcome. That, and many people are not online all the time like most of us here. They just don't really care that much about online stuff.
I introduced quite a few people too, most of them online "junkies". The concept is very interesting and they're all hooked, initially. And it's all fun and games until they get flagged by asshole or they stumble upon some drama filled post - and you simply can't avoid those. The feeling they get after a while is that it's all "an insider game", and there is simply too much aggression in the tone and in the majority of actions to stick around. The aggression became so pervasive that even if you choose carefully your circle of friends, you can't avoid it anymore.
Seems to me that those who are still sticking around either have a thick skin or they just want to milk the system and run away once it dries up.
Congrats @lukestokes! It's just a question of time before Steem's price really take off. How long? Nobody knows.
Sounds good to me.
Might be a good time for another decent tutorial on trading on the internal market and what you look for, dos, donts, etc. I'd welcome such a guide. I haven't really messed with it much.
Not a bad idea. Right now, it's more of just watching the trends and seeing what makes sense. When things spike too quickly in one direction or the other, it usually adjusts somewhat closer back to what it had been prior to that (for the most part).
But it's been going down on the long term trend for quite some time now. Will that reverse? I don't know.
Yeah that's hard to say. Unless there are some new news announcements, some positive changes from a hardfork, etc then it will likely continue to descend for some time.
I'd like to see it turn around, but I still consider it largely a success.
I'd love to see it turn around, but yeah. There's still quite a bit of STEEM out on the markets so it would take a lot of demand to turn things around. I'm thinking the other major social media platforms may have to really piss off a lot of people before there's a real demand for alternatives, at which point Steemit might make it big.
Me too, just not a financial one.
Yet.
I would learn by reading that stuff, this I know.
Congrats on 250! That's a nice SP rank!
I've been as close as 800th once, unfortunately circumstances made me have to power down but hoping to be back there some day.
Currently climbing the golos leaderboards slowly and steadily with curation rewards. :)
I think you madr a nice decision to power up now, even if price were to go a bit lower I doubt it will drop too much and you'll probably make up the difference in inflation/curation. :)
Curation on Golos? Interesting. You have a bot voting up random stuff or do you know Russian?
The inflation is pretty non-existent at this point, unfortunately. Maybe that's for the best though as things were getting out of control.
If I ever get my BTC investments out so I could play with house money, that would be great. I'm kind of doubtful that will happen any time soon though.
Hehe, google translate :p
I curate there manually with a wide distribution in mind just like I have been doing here for the past months. :)
Last I checked, I think I hadn't around $150 in value over there, or something like that. I haven't logged in yet. I wasn't planning on changing my keys on Steemit before doing so.
It might've gone down a bit more lately. I invested .1 btc and in USD sold 600-700 golos and made back the (then 70$) in btc I invested back. Since I have nothing to lose anymore I decided to stay powered up and help the platform grow with my influence. :)
Nicely done!
Movin on up!
Thanks. :)
Great post man, I am happy for you. I noticed this in my feed going thru. I know we do not talk much but I personally find you neat.
Nice job on everything. I am just the Minnow Life representative still lol
Thanks Barry. If I hadn't dropped quite a bit of BTC in the beginning, I'd be swimming with the minnows also. Now I'm at least starting to find the pack of dolphins out there looking for whales. :)
Cool. Now we just need 10,000-100,000 more people to do the same! 😜
On a side note I've been enjoying your posts lately. Keep it up!
Thanks Brian!
Yeah, it's going to take quite a bit of new blood to keep this body functioning. Who knows if or when that will happen.
I wonder what very early bitcoiners felt like as the price was bouncing all around. They had nothing else to really compare to, I guess, so they probably thought everything was a gift.
This is a pretty awesome platform... I'm still learning the ropes here. Everytime I read something like that, I get a little more confident about the long term prospects, and a little more likely to just use my Steem to power up, rather than cashing out... I like the idea of slowly becoming a stakeholder as a result of contributing. Sometimes it feels like I "arrived too late," but then I remind myself that Steemit is still in Beta and very young, as part of the greater picture.
Heh, yeah. I think people who bought up bitcoin at $1 or $30 thought they arrived too late also when others were buying at pennies and selling at $1, feeling like geniuses. It's all a matter of perspective and timescale, I guess.
I kind of wish I had arrived a little later. Than I wouldn't have bought it at the high prices I did. At the same time, I'm glad to have enjoyed the inflation protection via Steem Power while STEEM was being diluted. Even though in USD and BTC terms, I've surely lost money currently, the Steem Power holdings are much higher and, if the price does go up, I should do rather well.
Contributing has become a nice reward in and of itself.