My State of STEEM Thoughts

This post has been a few nights in the making. The previous nights my feelings were so negative I'd decide to sleep on it and see how I felt the next day. I'm glad I did that because I had a chance to listen to some other fellow Steemians and I've heard/seen some things that gave me a little morale boost.

but...

Not going to mince words on the reality. It really sucks that Steemit is powering down 34 million Steem. This coming after Ned already powered down most of his Steem as well. All of this without any sort of "official" explanation. I'm aware of what Ned said in the MSP meeting. I don't think that's satisfactory for a move that is so obviously going to be perceived as hugely negative. I'm also aware of the little memo in the power down action that basically says they're moving the Steem to secure accounts. I'm also aware of the supposed reasons for doing this, but for something this huge, for the love of God, this is a social platform. Make a POST explaining it in detail!

But the reality is, no explanation would make this not suck. No matter the reason, they're removing transparency. At this point they could power down all that STEEM and dump it all on the market at once, or sell it in little bits over time, or not sell it at all. The key factor is, we won't know what they do with it. If the market starts to rise and Steem inexplicably falls behind, there's no way to know if it's because they're selling on the way up, or if it's a million other things it could be. At this point, if you want to keep your investment here, or build a dapp here, or invest new funds, you have to be okay with the risk that at any moment. Steemit can dump 34 million STEEM on the market and we'll all be left holding the bag.

Now, I'm aware that it would actually be really stupid of them to do that. Not sure if single digit millions is worth being labeled a crook for life and not being able to work in the space ever again, but again, it's the fact that it's even a possibility that sucks so much.

There's a lot of people saying Steemit =/= STEEM. While technically true, if Steem is the body, Steemit is both legs, one arm, and a kidney. Sure we might be able to survive if we lose all that, but the road ahead from that point won't look anything like what we've all been hoping for, and definitely not attractive compared to all the other projects out there.

So that was all pretty negative, I mentioned something about a morale boost. So the positive things I've observed over the last few days are that Hivemind went live. I won't pretend to understand any specifics of this, but basically it makes running a full node cheaper and aids in decentralizing the blockchain which we obviously desperately need. This also just shows that Steemit can actually deliver something, so maybe they'll also deliver the other stuff on the to-do list(RockDB, SMT-lite).

But that's not the main thing that gave me another shot of STEEM juice. It was something I saw on one of @trevonjb's videos and he said one thing, but what I took from it was a little different and I'll just stick to that.

There's something we have here that's more valuable than the cryptocurrency itself, or any of the dapps that have come out so far. It's this community. I don't mean that in a cheesy kumbaya sort of way, I mean in literal value. It takes years to create a community like the one we have here. The people here, the ones that are STILL here, STILL developing, STILL posting, STILL powering up, we are all a bunch of crazy hardcore fanatics. If you objectively described this current situation to anyone and they were hearing it for the first time, they would probably think you're nuts for investing or building something here, but people are still doing it. They'll probably keep doing it until this thing literally won't function. Just like after all this negative shit I just mentioned, I'm still posting, and I'll probably post again tomorrow and the day after that.

There's so many issues that we're trying to tackle as a community, and honestly sometimes it feels like we're getting nowhere fast, but I personally have never been one to let past failures stop me from just doing it again, trying again, trying something else, over and over until you get it right, or improve.

And none of that guarantees success, but when I think about the REAL reason this is exciting to me, it isn't about a big payout after a bull run or whatever. I seriously think this tech could change the world. That black mirror post I wrote also has a flip side that would be unimaginably positive. At scale, communities could fund movies, tv shows, games, comics, relief funds, charities, art, music, any "thing" that could be supported by money, which is EVERYTHING pretty much.

So all that to say, I'm not done here yet, but I have to say, I do wish Steemit would be better and do better, but even if they don't(which they've given no indication they will) I'll still be here trying to make this a better place however I can. I hope you'll stick around too, so I can have company as we sink into oblivion if that's what's in the stars for us.

Thanks for reading!