Its time for my obligatory end of the year retrospective for this year of 2017 which is about to come to an end. My last retrospective basically was setting goals for myself in the future and while I met many of them, circumstances have changed so much that goals moved around. For starters, this is the craziest year in crypto since I got involved in 2012 and with that came much change. We saw futures being traded on Wall Street institutions and a level of legitimacy far past the point I thought we would be.

The most obvious change is the price which in a single year has skyrocketed far beyond what I thought it could. I was estimating these prices for 2020, even with the recent drop we just had. So much is going on now and in the pipeline that I can only hope we will have similar years. However with the semi mainstream adoption came many scams and coins capitalizing on new users via ICOs. While it does seem people are realizing now that it isnt the best idea to invest in them, I think it will still take more for a big realization on a mass scale.

In terms of me personally, I have had a successful year, not only in earnings, but trying to stick to my goals. I wanted to try and write an article a day for the full year, but with a few things going on I fell short of that goal. It will still be my goal for next year though, the hardest part is keeping up with ideas and actually getting myself to write. I have been investing almost all of my earnings this year into steem so I will continue to do so for the near future.

Steemit itself has seen tremendous growth in the number of users and applications. With programmers hard at work and people actively spreading the word, more and more are using the platform. This has seen a crazy boost in the price of steem and steem dollars. Hopefully this will continue as the inflation rate continues to get smaller. I think many like me are buying up all they can to try and run their own businesses through the platform. I can only hope everyone keeps up the hard work and that we see as much growth next year.

I want to finish with a bit of a guess of what I think 2018 will be like for the cryptocurrency space and perhaps my life overall. In terms of crypto, I still think we will see a massive correction with many of the coins currently at some point, even bitcoin. However if an ETF does happen for bitcoin I think we will see many people purchase it just because of ease of purchase. I think the ICO space still hasnt blown up yet and we might ultimately see that just based solely on developers not delivering promises. I hope for bitcoin we can see lightning by the end of the year to help declog the mempool and perhaps companies will start using segwit more.

For myself im going to keep writing here and attempt to do an article a day, but no doubt I will miss some. I also will most likely be having a surgery on my chest in order to remove wires from my heart surgery a few years ago. They have been bothering me and I havent been able to lift weights so I have been gaining a bit of weight. My ultimate goal is to get my chest fixed and start getting back into shape. Well see what happens in the new year. I dont think any of us know the future, but hopefully 2018 will be better for all of us!

-Calaber24p