Am I reasonably optimistic about Steem or just childishly overexcited? I could be both, but I have good reasons.

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With the protracted decline in the price of STEEM, a lot of things have changed.

If this were just another ICO token with no real world product then the token would be dying. I've seen enough of those to know when the project has lost some or even all of these important things:

• Relevance
• Competitive edge
• Vision
• Leadership that instills confidence through product delivery and not just talk (hats off to @elipowell, @andrarchy, @vandeberg, @roadscape, @justinw and the rest of the team)
• Funding or economic sustainability
• Innovation (hats off to everyone creating stuff on Steem)

I don't see any of the above missing with Steem. So I prefer to call this phase a redistribution period.

Why redistribution?

The current market conditions are getting STEEM into more hands that care for the platform (I mean, no one is buying or earning it from hype right now. No FOMO and no wild expectations because the market is sane). So when the market turns again, we will get to retain most of the value gained and resist downward pressures in the future. (this is not financial advice, it's just my opinion)

The Steem blockchain has an interesting development roadmap that will add significant utility value to the STEEM token. It gets more reassuring when you consider that we have a community of people who are bringing in many different kinds of capital:

• Monetary capital: buying STEEM, powering up
• Skill and intellect: collective intelligence, developing things
• Attention: attention value is being built up and it can be monetized in way that benefits token holders and further aligns our interests

There are people buying STEEM because there is an appealing perception of discount. The price is down (a lot, from all-time high) and the number of active users on the platform is also down. These important metrics are connected, but that's a topic for another day. There's something else going on.

Noticeable progress

• Progress has been made on development and we are actually ticking things off from the roadmap.
• Hivemind communities are around the corner and the improvements in user engagement/experience will increase one of the metrics above: active users.
• Hivemind also lays the foundation for features that add utility value based on the attention or presence of active users. Like the Native Ads feature I'm working on.
• The recent hardfork has changed behaviors on this platform, for the better I would say.

I'm more optimistic about Steem now than I was last year. Am I overexcited? Maybe. I tend to get overexcited about this cryptocurrency space, especially when it comes to tangible progress on software development.

And ever since I resumed coding again (after a long hiatus) I have a better appreciation of the software development process. So it really excites me to see features being developed and released, flaws being corrected and results speaking for themselves.

Steem... This is a fun experiment; but isn't all of life an experiment?

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