A lot of people are practically on suicide watch right now with the prices of crypto. Well I'm here to tell you it could go lower. We never know where the bottom is and this year feels a lot like 2014. Even when good news comes out it might not give us much relief. Ask yourself how many retail investors are continually committing capital to the market right now to average down. Doesn't seem to be enough because most people were over extended in Nov, Dec, and Jan and then entered a dopamine fueled euphoria and didn't take any profits and then got completely smashed by the Mt. Gox trustee dumping tons of Bitcoins and Bitcoin Cash among other factors.

STEEM Can Be A Double Whammy

The toughest thing about STEEM for those of us who are on here all the time is that when the prices go down it is not only a loss on our money but also our time gets completely devalued. For one dimensional cryptos like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum....etc a person usually has traded their time for money previously at a job and then they invest in the hope of capital appreciation.

With STEEM you might do the same thing and then on top of that you are trying to amplify it by spending time here producing content.

When the price goes down you are upside down on your investment and then you may have blogged for $0.50 / hour. It isn't a good feeling. You feel like you wasted your time on the front end and on the backend.

I don't really have a solution for you because I don't know anyone's situation. Suddenly bills might be piling up and unless you had liquid STEEM when it spikes real fast then you could be feeling some major pain.

What I Thought STEEM Was Going To Be Like

I thought that a lot of the people from back in 2016 would still be around and we would all put each other on auto votes and so going forward everyone would be moving forward as a unit. Even if all these people were all voting for each other at 5% or 10% power then it would become significant but this hasn't been the case. There are about 3 people who remember me from 2016. Then there are the handful of people who sort of got to a critical mass point to where their power became enough to where they could feed themselves so they just cut a lot of people off and now keep their power at 95% and mainly just upvote themselves and trade votes with higher value accounts. So I guess I was totally wrong in thinking I knew how people would behave. There have been a lot of people who overtime I realized I hadn't got an upvote from them for 6 months but I was still upvoting every one of their posts through my autovoter but eventually I just had to cut them off. I think it is one of the hardest things about STEEM is trying to hustle and maintain receiving votes over a long period of time when it shouldn't really be that hard if everyone just put each other on autovoters. It really isn't that hard but that isn't how this place played out.

Think Like The Ninja Mine Whales

Some people might act like it is negative to talk about the unfair initial distribution but if you don't factor it in the back of your mind you are likely going to get crushed. The distribution is so lopsided that at a moments noticed some whale is ready to dump tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands worth of STEEM right on your head.

The most I paid for STEEM was $3.68 which has turned out to be too much if the prices go lower or this continues for months or potentially years. You have to realize that a lot of these whales whether they were founders or in the inside circle and were able to ninja mine and they got this stuff for pennies so they are way in the money and when there is a price bump they are ready to dump.

It is like you have to be ready move in and out of this as well and timing is going to be everything.

No Matter Where You Are From........

.....You are unlikely to sustain yourself from STEEM unless you don't have any bills somehow. You might feel that someone in a 3rd world country that they could do it but money attracts money on this platform so if they don't have much STEEM Power they are unlikely to get sustained upvotes from people with power. You will often end up in a voting ring with your people around your same power levels.

One play would be to power up a massive amount over 100,000 Steem Power when prices are "low" and at those power levels you would be able to rub shoulders with some other higher power circle jerkers and you might be able to get to a point where you can sustain yourself paraphrasing CoinDesk or CoinTelegraph articles. There is no real honor in it but business is harsh here.

Am I Negative About STEEM? ........ Why Am I Still Here?

I'm not negative about it I just speak the truth about STEEM. It is the most advanced crypto platform out there. More advanced than EOS since the ecosystem is way more built out.

STEEM is the best way to earn crypto with little to no investment upfront.

I would say other good ways would have been by keeping your eyes out for different forks and airdrops and possibly investing in Masternodes / Supernodes. With SmartCash you can get one for $720 at this point and earn more every month from SmartRewards and SmartNode payouts.

The reason why I'm still here is it is the best way to earn more crypto and continually getting payouts coming in like clockwork.

EOS might quickly become the best way to earn if we start getting tons of airdrops from the 3rd party projects. Also if on down the line another group launches an additional chain we could benefit from that as well.

All that is an unknown right now though. What we know is STEEM is still cranking away. There are a lot of unknowns with it and as we have seen everything keeps changing overtime for better or for worse.

I think a big thing to remember with STEEM and other cryptos is the spikes happen very fast and someone is ready to dump on your head. STEEM is especially bad in this situation because the distribution was so screwed from the beginning. So you might want to prepare yourself to do a similar thing or risk being upside down.

Another Dose Of Reality

Again this isn't being said out of negativity but just realization. It is super unlikely that anyone ends up getting rich being a content creator on this platform. What I mean by that is someone coming here and not powering up a ton of money and then just based on earnings and price appreciation off of those earnings becomes worth a million or two million dollars.

The situation with that has actually become more unlikely overtime. The only ones that sort of got close were @stellabelle @papa-pepper and @rok-sivante . With those situations it looked more like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well worth their time but not "rich." In the early days back in 2016 there was a period of time where the whales favored @stellabelle and @rok-sivante so they were able to earn a significant amount. @papa-pepper was a little different because he consistently posted when everyone was on Suicide watch in winter of 2016/2017 and then when the prices suddenly surged it was worth a lot. It was again all dependent on them pulling money out though when the prices spiked. Now instead of getting the whale upvotes it is more about DTube or DLive providing consistent upvotes to people so once again it is their pick and most other votes aren't influencing the situation much.

Another thing is that for the most part most of the Witnesses are pretty much locked in stone at this point. That is how it has been since the beginning and there have been a couple exceptions where people were able to move into the top 20 who weren't one of the ninja miners or early people. It just isn't a good feeling knowing that myself or other people have the technical capabilities to be Witnesses and could provide more for this community than some of the people up in those positions but there is no real way we would ever get powerful enough votes to move us into even the top 40. I have seen a ton of very qualified people try and basically waste their money and time.

Conclusion

The tech behind STEEM and all the ways to connect to it are badass but in the end you have to treat it like a business and always remember that the majority of STEEM was mined for pennies and it is easy to get dumped on. I really don't think that just holding STEEM and continually blogging and building STEEM Power for years on end without cashing out or trying to ride the waves is a good idea. Mainly because in 2016 when I first found out about STEEM it was $4. Well we have been well under that and less than half of that 2 years later.

I almost think a better strategy is skim a significant fraction of your account value when prices are high and try to re-accumulate when it is low. Good luck with that timing though but if you never cash completely out then you should still partially be able to catch a ride up even if you were caught off guard.

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