If I were to cash out my investment now, that would be like me quitting school, again.

This is a very "HODL"-esque statement, which made me think.

"HODL" is a very big philosophy you come across in crypto. "Never sell, only buy." This is due to most coins having a deflationary model. Assuming that at least some quantity of Bitcoin is permanently lost every year, for example.... the total supply of Bitcoin approaches zero, even though currently supply is still rising.

This is naturally a Big Deal for long-term investors. It means that over time, the pie shrinks, and that means that compared to others just getting in, their piece will be bigger. "HODL," then, as a philosophy, is effectively betting on the centralisation of wealth-- into your own pocket. It's arguably advocating for a large-scale decentralised pyramid scheme. It's a very selfish angle to take.... and regardless of anyone's political views, I think the "peer pressure" to HODL Bitcoin hurts the movement. People aren't stupid. They don't want to be bagholders. As time goes on, the same type of people who wanted Bitcoin to succeed in the beginning are going to want it to fail.

Steem is different, though. When you "HODL" STEEM you get nothing. You aren't rewarded for holding it. In fact, over time, your relative piece of the pie will shrink if you don't do anything due to the new STEEM being created.

This means that you have to participate, for better or for worse, in the community in order to see any benefits. You are incentivised to help make your investment a success. By forcing users to lock away their STEEM in order to use it to that end, the Steem blockchain has already accomplished something no other cryptocurrency has (that I know of) from a technical perspective: it has programmatically created a check against the "pure speculation" argument. I think this can be summed up in a single sentence: STEEM is the only blockchain I know of on which you can "HODL" and participate in the economy at the same time.

Sure, there's the "buy and replace" strategy for the other cryptos. But you don't have to buy anything; simply by holding a lot of SP and upvoting posts, you are contributing to building the economy, as well as (hopefully) making the place more attractive to outsiders.

STEEM is one of the most fascinating social experiments I have ever seen, and I find myself feeling sorry that I didn't start participating sooner. I'm not yet sure whether it will succeed economically long-term. I'm not sure if it can overcome the "toxicity wars" we are seeing now. One of my friends who has been watching Steemit complains that every time he checks the main page, it is filled with some kind of drama post about reward pool allocation or vote buying. I think we need to fix that before we will ever go mainstream. Nobody wants to read about that stuff.

Overall, however, STEEM is rapidly becoming my favourite crypto... and that's saying something, because I like Monero a lot.