New Year landmark

It was only 5 months ago that I did my very first vlog to mark 2000 Steemit followers. Now I've kicked off the New Year by hitting 5000 followers. Crazy stuff! One of my aims for the New Year is to carve out (even) more time to engage with commenters in terms of replies and upvotes.

I truly apppreciate only that takes the time to not only consume my content but to provide constructive feedback (both positive and negative).

Steeming On!

I can't remember who I was speaking to but a couple of days ago I was musing on which crypto would experience a "New Year's Day" bounce. It felt kind of inevitable. I had no idea it would be STEEM getting a pump!

This bounce is a great tonic for everyone holding STEEM and Steem Power. Better to start the year hitting all-time highs than all-time lows.

I like this ATH more than the last for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we no longer have the crazy inflation of over 100% pa. New STEEM is currently being emitted at a far more reasonable 9% pa and falling. STEEM is a lot more scarce and I would expect less sell pressure than last time.

Secondly the Steem platform has matured in terms of reward distribution. The last ATH saw the top getting rewards in the tens of thousands. As of now it looks like we'll be lucky to see top posts hitting $1k without a significant increase further in the price. This is probably due to three reasons. (1) Whales self-regulating how they reward content. (2) Steem Power being better distributed (3) there being a lot more quality contributors worthy of and receiving rewards.

It's a slow grind and reward distribution is not perfect, but it's getting there. The more people that are on-boarded, the better it will get.

Steem flirts

I think it is easy to under-sell how many people own some Steem at the moment. I know many people that flirted with Steem for a few weeks, earned some Steem, didn't quite understand how the money worked (or get the amounts they were hoping for) and forgot about it. For many their Steem accounts will be worth 20 times more than when they last left it. Invariably those people will be back posting; kicking themselves that they didn't stick with it and allocate just 30 minutes a day of their social media downtime to a platform that actually gives them something back for their engagement.

Billion dollar club

Another big milestone hit on New Years day was STEEM hitting a marketcap in excess of 1 billion dollars. This is a great psychological milestone reached.

It seems ludicrous that a coin with 1 million transactions a day is languishing behind other coins that are either little more than a pipe dream or have zero traction in terms of actual users.

Decentralised treasury

I had some downtime on New Years day so watched a video on Cardano by Charles Hokinson. I wanted to find out what all the hype.was abouy. While it was interesting I wasn't blown away nor hit by any major "ah ha!" moments. It was different/ similar approaches to the same problems. Some of which they were 'thinking' about how to tackle.

One of which was sustainability and funding development/ innovation. He talked about implementing a treasury similar to Dash.

I think Steem has the best, most efficient, streamlined method of funding. The 'proof-of-brain' protocol where the community upvotes content it deems valuable seems the most sustainable way of funding innovation without layers of bureaucracy.

Vlog

Any way here is a vlog I did on this morning. Apologies for the sweating! I had just finish showering after my first workout of the New Year... Although my wife would say I always breakout into sweating fits after 5 minutes with the baby!