But even taking off my business hat and looking at my personal account here on steem ( this account) I still feel uncompforable saying come to steem when steem might not be steem in a few months. Steem is complicated enought without trying to explain that oh in a few months you will have to do a token swap .....

Steem was too complicated to pitch to other people at a personal level even without bringing up the possible future of the Steem token. SBD versus STEEM versus SP versus "voting manna"/RC – that whole side of things was both way too prominent in the social culture and way too prominent as a pitch from Steemit Inc. That is one of the many problems that we had in actually getting people on board even at the height of the value of the token.

What I said applies even to us from a personal perspective – we should not be looking to provide the platform value, we should be talking about and looking at how the platform provides us value. In a real sense, the Steem blockchain has fallen down on that outside of the value of the token over the last two years (and one could as sensibly and reasonably argue that they've fallen down on that as regards the value of the token over the last two years).

As much as a lot of people don't want to hear this – and that number may include you but this isn't judgment – the obsession with HODL and never moving token value off of the platform in order to exchange it for something that you could have got, by selling it for something you wanted, doesn't actually increase the inherent value of it in that sense of what it has brought to you in exchange for your work. I at least say "well, I sold some for Amazon cards when it had some real value and it paid for this new monitor in this really nice keyboard and my sous vide machine". I literally put my finger on what value it has provided me and I'm good with that. But if you haven't actually extracted value from the platform and you have invested your own money from outside of the platform, it might be time to seriously sit down and evaluate which direction the value is flowing for you personally.

When we invite people to join us on most social media platforms, it's because we know that they will be able to find our content, our work, our creations, more easily, more comfortably, or more conveniently via that mechanism. The work is first, our creations are first, and the mechanism of delivery exists to facilitate us. That is one of the things that both Twitter and Facebook got right at the beginning, they recognized that their job was to be useful to you and then get out of the way. The way people approach the Steem blockchain and the digital applications attached to it have that exactly the wrong way around for the most part and put us in this position where we either have to sell the platform in order to get people to see our content or accept that it provides a really small tool in terms of value for sharing our content.

(I wouldn't expect a token swap. I could be wrong but TRON has enough of a market And enough market liquidity that it doesn't look like there would be a whole lot to be gained by just adding STEEM to its mix. Unless Justin Sun was just obsessed with the idea of merging their governance architectures, a token swap would just be burning value in the overhead to reduce replication and redundancy of storage nodes. I'm not saying someone couldn't make that bad decision but I am saying it would be a bad decision.)

Sure look, it is what it is and I guess we will have to see what tide the sun brings in (it would be way better if his name was moon)

Judging from the number of grumpy people around here, I'd say the moon tide has been in for at least six months. We could make a real killing selling ice cream and chocolate bars.)