I’ve been holding off for as long as possible, but today I initiated a substantial Powerdown of my HIVE Stake. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I have been experiencing a bit of a Cashflow Issue recently. I thought that I could get by on my Author Rewards with a few other income sources, but I can’t. I started using a service on HIVE called 
The annoying thing is that I’ve copped some of those flags on my posts promoting HIVE Community Fundraising so when I get told I’m making “low effort short post” it kind of stings a little. With LEO Threads and Ecency Waves now I thought we might have gotten past that stage of insisting on Long Form Posts and accusing people of Reward Pool Rape because my posts are easily more than x100 the size of the Threads and Waves, but whatever.
The situation kind of gives me flashbacks to the New STEEM days when there was a lot of flagging going on and wars were being fought over the Trending Pages...but I digress. I’ve never had a problem with flags before but maybe I’ve been here too long and I’ve been guilty of turning a blind eye to the way HIVE really works.
I wanted to be up front about my Powerdown and explain what’s going on with me so that there is no misunderstanding. This decision to Powerdown has NOTHING to do with my involvement in the Silver Gold Stackers Community on HIVE, whom I continue to serve. We have another big fundraiser coming up and I want to continue focusing on that in the short term. What I do with my personal stake should not affect that at all and if I ever do need to pull my support from the community project I’ll be giving everyone plenty of notice. That will genuinely be a last resort.
As for HIVE itself, I was previously hoping to hit 300K Hive Power this year, but that won’t be happening now. I am now going to pull out 40K HIVE this June to keep on top of my bills before the End of Financial Year here in Australia. I acknowledge that doing a Powerdown of that size may draw some other unwanted attention if HIVE Whales decide that I am extracting too much value from the ecosystem. We will see if things escalate from here, but the situation is what it is and I make no apology for doing what I am doing.
Maybe this reflection point is going to turn out to be a blessing in disguise because its always good to find out where you really stand and sometimes its a case of being - The sooner the better.
