HIVE was born at a price about 0.18 USD and soon dropped to about 0.10, then spiked to almost a dollar, and has since slowly deflated back down to 0.13 right now.

That spike to a dollar and back was caused by a big exhanging offering money to anyone buying up a large amount of HIVE. Once the contest was over, the new HIVE holders sold their tokens back into the market, crashing the price. But that temporary spike happens to be when most STEEM users converted their tokens over to HIVE, including me. Everything that powered down went over to HIVE. I have nearly 10k HIVE and almost 0 STEEM, something that many people did back in May.

STEEM is now 0.15 so that has turned out to be a bad move. We should have stayed in STEEM all along, if we're trying to protect/earn purchasing power.

During the same time frame, Bitcoin has also floundered, but has lost far less. Anyone holding BTC this year has done well despite the pullbacks.

The problem with HIVE, and to lesser degree, STEEM:

These currencies are designed to lose value. They were never meant to be held, but only sold as soon as they're received. That's why there are no HIVE investors, just people who earn $50 per post here, and sell it for fiat or BTC immediately. That's what I should have been doing.

Instead of putting my only $5k into STEEM back in early 2018, I should have just kept earning STEEM with my posts, and kept my $5k in BTC. I'd have almost $10k worth of BTC now, PLUS thousands of dollars worth of post payouts.

In other words, I'd have gone from 5k to 20k or more, if I'd cashed out every payout for ANYTHING OTHER THAN STEEM and HIVE.

Steem and Hive have lost 99% of their value while I have held them, and then another 99% from there. It's impossible to hold any value (or make a profit) when your main holding is losing 99% every year, year over year.

No matter how hard I work on posts, comments, curation, and other participation here, it's useless. I'm literally working thousands of hours here to watch my value drop to zero because everybody else has figured this out, except me.

Well, I have it figured out now, and I realize this place is a trap for money. I'm down $20k PLUS 3 years of daily work.

I think STEEM and HIVE will lose another 99% in the coming 12 months, and again the following 12 months, and so on. It's designed to do so, but you have to learn that yourself - it isn't mentioned anywhere official.