I've taken this opportunity to power up another 1200 Steem. Man it sure is cheap. What an awesome time to be a buyer. Of course, no one wants to hear that because we've been bleeding for the last 18 months, but whatever. Silver lining.

Personally, I think 100 Steem is a lot. Considering the current distribution of coins it is highly improbable that a million people could ever afford 100 Steem. Also, the amount of resource credits one gets from 100 Steem is currently pretty generous in my opinion.

Think about it: every time you do anything on the blockchain that information gets saved to every node forever. For me, this is quite mind boggling when I really start to parse the logistics of that fact, especially considering resource credits are given out for "free".

Scaling

Steem is often touted as a DLT that scales well. This is true depending on the context. Compared to other DLT it scales quite well, but compared to every other centralized database solution it is a hunk of junk from a scaling perspective.

Andreas Antonopoulos talks a lot about technological scaling in general. We've been pushing the boundaries of the Internet since its inception. You know who's boundaries are not being pushed right now? Steem.

That's because no developer here has actually created a decentralized application where the burden of spending resource credits falls on the users. It is more difficult to program for blockchain applications with this in mind because most developers are far more concerned with how they are going to make money off of their hard work. This pushes them toward efficient centralized services and servers controlled completely by a single entity.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: When actual decentralized applications start being propagated here, Steem blocks are going to start getting filled to the brim. Resource credits will actually be worth something because the supply is no longer seemingly infinite. People will have to start thinking about what they want on the blockchain and what they don't, rather than just doing whatever they want because we can currently scale a hundred times higher than we are today with little effort.

Of course, if you are reading this, you probably won't have to worry about any of this. It will be the new users who can't even manage to get 20 Steem on their account who are going to be the most annoyed and cry about how it wasn't fair that we all got in so early, just like today we cry about ninja mines and people who bought at 8 cents and all that.

It's not about timing the market, it's about time in the market

I've almost been here for 2 years, and what a bumpy ride it has been. There may be a lot of blood in the water, but my rule of thumb is that I have to give these communities at least 4 years (1 Bitcoin cycle) to turn around and make their comeback. Everything else until then is just noise, and I hear a lot of noise, but I also see a lot of progress, even if it doesn't come in the form of increased STEEM/USD.

Posting and Active key compromised.

I accidentally leaked my posting and active key to the Internet a few weeks back. I allowed them to stay leaked for quite some time just to see if anything would happen. It didn't. This is how early in the game we are. I can straight up leak my keys to the Internet and no one is even around to exploit it. Even if they had been used maliciously, the damage would have been minimal because the vast majority of my stake is powered up.

This brings me back to the tired speech of how Steem has better security and user experience than other projects. I sent 1200 Steem from Binance for a 0.01 Steem fee. Where did I send it?

_{8254C329A92850F6D539DD376F4816EE2764517DA5E0235514AF433164480D7A}

Nope, sent it to @edicted. It's these little things we take for granted that end up making a huge difference to new users. Zero fees, three levels of security, three second blocks, blah blah blah. I know you've heard it 1000 times before, but it really will have the value that people claim.

Annoyed about master key security.

I ended up finally changing my password today and remain very annoyed that as soon as it's changed it becomes exposed to the Internet.

_{https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@edicted/steem-airgap-hardware-wallet-utopian-io}

My idea for an airgapped hardware wallet still stands. We can bring the security of this project to an entirely new and elevated level in the future. It will literally be impossible to steal a Steem account in the future without cracking encryption or having physical access to the hardware that the information is stored on. It's progressions like this that will really give big investors peace of mind when making the decision to invest their time and money here.

Alright, I think I'm done shilling Steem for now. Sure, there are a lot of problems, but there are also a lot of people who care and want the best thing for the community. Peace.