I've powered down on and off throughout the last 4 years of my time as a member of this community, but always considered the fact that I wanted to stick around or that I'd be missing out on a pump, but leading into the first and most recent pump in Hive's price since its conception, I made the decision to Power Down and cash out entirely. There's a few reasons for this, and not they're not necessarily typical of the traditional reasons for cashing out and having a small presence over all on the platform, but for once I felt like writing about something.
I remember talking to @macchiata over on Discord on where the price of Hive was and where I believed it was going. I had a pretty bullish sentiment over all due to the fact that we were relatively new in the charts still, and typically every new listing, even in stock markets, results in a huge sell-off in order to establish a floor and begin accumulation into a pump. I mentioned that this would be the year. What followed was my decision to begin Powering Down to prepare for a pump. Having witnessed the 2017 bull market on Steem and how many of us failed to Power Down and secure any profits, I knew I wanted to avoid that this time.
As well as securing profits, I felt that there were a number of reasons as to why Hive would follow the traditional route of pumping and thus dumping, typically relatively hard. I'll summarise a few of these points, given they too contributed to my decision to cash out, with few intentions of entering again:
- We're all bagholders. Inflation at such a scale results in never-ending dumping. This won't change.
- Due to market cycles and relatively small earnings via curation, not being liquid is more of a burden due to the lengthy Power Down period.
- The above statement applies even more to those who are not particularly active.
- Outside of curation, there's not much reason to have a considerable amount of Hive locked up to begin with. You're better having what you need for blockchain interactions and remaining mostly liquid.
- Development is slow and features aren't a strong enough counter to inflation, funds considered as an investment are best placed elsewhere.
- Holding Spot is more favourable in both short and long-term situations.
- Large increases in market value aren't sustainable.
- You're just upvoting yourselves and/or dumping on me [everyone] anyway with your larger accounts, so I may as well join.
- Most of you are pretty fucking annoying.
In recent months, I've felt less interest in writing, and more interest in building. This is more of a general shift in my own personality and ambitions rather than being specific to Hive, but the above points had a stronger amount of weight whenever I considered the future of this account here on Hive. Does this mean I'm leaving? Nope. I don't feel the need to leave forever, and I still enjoy doing things around Hive occasionally. I'd still like to post sometimes and contribute to certain fun communities and interact. I just don't feel the need to take part in the side of things that requires having locked stake in the network using this account.
I do feel that being on Hive is better when you're more low-profile. This place is riddled with greed and drama and it's fucking stupid for the most part, nothing really worthy of anyone's time in the end. In general I've felt more relaxed having spent a considerable less amount of time on here in recent months. The larger your account size, the more annoying everyone is going to be.
Going forward, I'll probably just cash out any earnings I get the moment I get them, and if not that, just Power Down and hold Spot to be prepared for any event. It just makes more sense that way. It'd be cool to see these issues addressed in the future, but we're far from that.