I joined Steem in August of 2016 after hearing about it from James Corbett of 
At the time I had heard of Bitcoin and even mined Bitcoin for a day in 2010ish. I had no idea what I was doing but followed some links on a whim. After a full day of mining and not even having "A full Bitcoin" I turned it off and mostly forgot about Bitcoin. I would hear about it in passing from time-to-time and think I really need to check that out, but until Steem I hadn't yet.
I logged into Steem and for about 2 years read everything I could get my hands on about Bitcoin, Crypto and Steem.
I learned that Freedom is messier than I pictured, and decentralized is a confusing topic.
A lot of people handled and swapped around a lot of money, and the price and rewards had little to do with internal actions, costs or anything I've learned to use as a measure.
I think the crypto days of profiting on ideas are numbered and that most projects will have to begin to develop a real business plan that balances costs and revenue. The excitement and hype of Bitcoin created some 2200 crypto projects many will not be viable in a slower market. The speculation and hype phase is mostly over in my opinion. I've often written about that phase after experiencing it working for Dot.com in the Late 90s early 2000s. I could be wrong and we could just be experiencing a bear market that will Moon again soon. I'm just not counting on it.
How will Steem handle that adjustment? Right now we don't seem to be positioned as well as I had imagined. The sheer amount of Stake that SteemIt Inc. holds, combined with our inability to know what their financial situation REALLY is and based on Ned's last "Bridge", I don't think they have a defined direction or plan. So, it is pretty difficult to predict anything. What we know that any community-driven efforts would have to be approved by witnesses who are easily controlled by Ned and SteemIt Inc's stake. They are a private company who does not report to us, does not hold community funds and does not have to justify it's actions or inactions to us. I haven't decided whether or not I am comfortable with that moving forward. This is not an attack on Ned, it doesn't matter WHO it is, it matters that there is a WHO. To be fair, I haven't seen Ned try to bully the community with his stake or even so much as pull a power play.
The current situation has me thinking about a lot of things...
I'm not even sure I like the idea of Free Transactions anymore, and I feel like I should have known better. Free means that SteemIt and the Witnesses were paying and during high times that worked out great, but now we have a community that is expecting rewards with or without a stream of revenue and free unlimited access to the site. We have Apps that don't appear to have a business model without the support of nodes and we have witnesses struggling to pay for equipment and an over-extended SteemIt Inc as our main and pretty much only development company.
Steem has always been and continues to be a high-risk investment and I've never lost sight of that, but now I am wondering if we are really supporting any of the ideas of cryptocurrency, decentralization, immutable, censorship-resistant.
Nothing is free, someone else is always paying for what you get for free and if money gets tight or directions change the entire economy is based on speculation and not a revenue stream it complicates things even more. That is where I see most of Steem right now. But not all and our community and extremely young economy have some really bright spots also.
We have accomplished many things during this experiment and for me it was my first real-life experience of practicing Freedom, learning the real challenges of decentralized anything. In addition, I've really enjoyed being exposed to an International Community and the diversity of ideas and cultures.
I don't know what the future brings and neither does anyone else, but I woke up this morning thankful for the experiment. If my investment of time here doesn't result in monetary gains, I think the experiment was worth it. Experiments are meant to answer questions, but often they result in new questions.
I couldn't have learned so much about the experiment if it hadn't been for all of you! The ever so discussed community!
@whatsup