Hello Steemians,

I‘m back at home after spending 6 days and 5 nights at SteemFest² in Lisbon. Transfer from Fenix Lisboa hotel to airport was easy, I had a friendly Taxi driver who was driving too fast. I wanted to check the speed of the car, but the display showed 0 km/h. I don’t know if this some kind of manipulation to extend allowed driving times, maybe you have an idea or made the same experience.

Compared to SteemFest 1 in Amsterdam I‘m now not so euphoric as I was last year after SteemFest. Off course it was nice to talk with old friends from last SteemFest, to meet people in real life from whom I only knewed the username on steemit so far and to learn about interesting and inspiring people I was not aware before My travel to Lisboa.

The performance problems of the last weeks on steemit.com webpage and the lack of communication from steemit inc decreased my trust into the development team. So it was very positive that a lot of the core developers attended SteemFest and I now trust that they are able to deliver the planned building blocks, even if some targets of the 2017 Roadmap were not achieved so far.

Another surprise was the awesome #beersaturday meetup on Saturday evening, it was community building as it‘s best. Although I like the beer posts, In my opinion the often posted beer reviews are not valuable content, it‘s more funny entertainment trash.

SteemFest organizer @roelandp did it again. In Amsterdam he operated on his well-known playground, and in Lisbon he organized 7 exquisite locations for

the Opening drinks at Fenix Garden hotel
Day 2 at Centro Cultural de Belem
Day 2 Evening at Snookerclub Lisbon
Day 3 at Montes Claros, Lisbon Secret Spot
the Night of Steem at Suspenso
the Art Exhibition at LX Factory
the Closing Dinner at Estufia Fria

Thank you very much, Roeland!

Luckily the sun was shining over the weekend, so we had perfect conditions to discover the beautiful city of Lisbon. I will definitively return some day to Lisbon to spend some more days there with my family.

One of my main goals for the trip was also to find out if there are any reasons to buy Steem in sight. To be honest, I have not found a single one. Of course we will get SMT‘s, but why should the price of Steem rise, if people use apps like appics and earn xap tokens and cash out these tokens to fiat money or bitcoin. Also, some of the major problems we currently have on steem(it) (selfvoting, votebuying, sp leasing) were not discussed. If i remember right, @ned answered to the question, what he plans to do against vote-buying, that it’s a free market and that it’s an opportunity. In my opinion this will not work in the long run. It seems it has to get much worser than today, before a change in the blockchain protocol will be implemented.

The only reasons I see STEEM is right now a buy are

STEEM is the blockchain with the most transactions per day
STEEM is THE onboarding gateway for Blockchain beginners

Buying or holding Steem is currently nothing more than a bet that the number of users and applications on the STEEM Blockchain could one day increase massively and the value of the STEEM token could increase.

I don‘t want to be unfair, but it‘s hardly possible to find real net-investors on SteemFest. Most part of the SteemFest attendies are net-earners, they invested their time and their content and have now either a valuable SteemPower stake or a well-filled bank account. So it‘s no wonder, that you see so many happy people on SteemFest, always praising this fantastic community, but sometimes you get the feeling that their is a community-belief that money is created by clicking the upvote button. At the end someone has to pay the bill, e.g. in the context of steem(it) currently the speculators and investors on the markets, they buy the cashed out steem and steem dollar and stabilize the price of the steem tokens.