Mate, I can hear the bitterness in this comment and I'm not criticizing that at all. I feel some of the same pain to be honest. The depreciation in steem/hive token value has been massive. I also haven't taken much out of steem/hive (just enough to pay $150 for a ryanair coach class flight to steemfest 3) over the 3 and a half years I've been writing on here. I've earned 99.9% of my hive and the rest was bought using sales of some steem. I'm a writer by trade and I value my craft far more than the $1500/3year that my hive holdings are currently worth.

I did sell a large portion of my steem into Bitcoin after the justin sun fork and I'm glad I did to be honest.

The strange reality is that after all that money and years poured in.... somebody else who doesn't like my message (for example, somebody who hates cannabis users?) could come along with $20, buy HIVE, power it up, and downvote everything I do until it is hidden.

This simply isn't true. $20 of hive right now is about 155 hive which would equate to less than $0.01 downvote. You could more than cancel that out with a self-upvote on your content.

But I understand the point. It is far easier for someone now to drop a thousand dollars into hive to reach 8000 HP and downvote attack someone who has spent a massive amount of time and energy building on this platform.

You seem to enjoy risk so what I'm saying probably sounds great to you.

Not really. 800 hive cost me almost exactly $100. Not a huge amount of a gamble if I'm honest. Still a gamble though.

It's the best time to buy HIVE, ever. So yes, maybe you should buy and power up. But the same was true 3 years ago, when I went all in. I heard EXACTLY the same arguments you are making here in this post.

Honestly I do feel for you and anyone else who bought near the peak though drutter. I had similar gut wrenchingly bad moves during the whole 2017 ICO craze buying into con projects, probably all told if I'd just held the bitcoin I spent on ICO's until now, I'd have over $20000 instead of the sum total of about $15 value that those bags of alts are now worth.

Anyway, I appreciate your comment and perspective. 🤞 things do start moving up for hive.