I've promised a lot of people that I will be posting more regular posts and while I'm still finishing up on some projects that are prime for restarting now with the new hardfork I'll try my best to post more here and there. The pressure of having to post long and quality posts due to so much stake and autovotes being cast onto my account has dropped after the hardfork and after my streaming spree as well, so now I can finally just post about my thoughts without giving it to much thought, hehe.
Without trying to brag about it, I just wanna mention that way back when most people heard about Bitcoin the first time, the majority ignored it and quickly forgot about it. To many mainstream news were the deciding factor, many didn't even research it properly and many didn't even hear about the underlying technology as we all know today; blockchain. For some reason I decided not to let go of this, ignore the fud, the negative usage of it and the volatile price. I like to think I've been right many steps of the way, sticking with Bitcoin even tho the majority of no-coiners called it a scam, sticking with Ethereum even though the majority of bitcoiners called it a scam and finally moving over to DPOS coins even though the majority of blockchainers called it a scam and shitcoin.
Well, well, well. While Bitcoin is looking into centralized options to scale such as the Lightning Network, the Ethereum Network is looking into evolving into Proof of Stake. Oh hello there, welcome to the club. While I have to admit that PoS still needs a lot of things to figure itself out and stabilize, same thing goes to say about DPoS, we are still way ahead of PoW chains that are just slow, costly and ineffective for daily usage.
Many of us were here during the last bull run and noticed every coin being bought up or manipulated to be bought up, there was not much reason going on. It felt like a mania of FOMO from outsiders and insiders feeling like they've missed something in a coin and not wanting to miss out on astronomical returns by not holding some of it. It was a lot of dumb money coming in combined with greedy money from easy profits and many hedging their Bitcoin profits into the next rocket. What I am hoping for the next bull run is that it will be a lot more deciding on what the blockchains and projects have actually managed to make of themselves during the last bear run. As many agree, such as the CEO of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is that there aren't many currencies yet with actual usage. Most of the ERC-20 tokens have barely a handful of active daily users, going up to the most popular ones its still miniscule compared to Steem's daily activity as well even though we are at the lowest we've been this year there too.
While big projects are still working on scaling, we at Steem are already way ahead of that with the base being DPoS which makes transactions have no fees, believe it or not the barrier of entry to Steem is the easiest around even though to us it feels quite difficult knowing how much can still improve and with the recent hardfork hopefully will. Most importantly though the use-case. "Steem revived blogging" was quite a popular saying at one stage but unfortunately I haven't heard it a lot lately. Sure it might be due to Medium's success but even there it is quite centralized and middlemen are taking a big cut for essentially doing something that Steem already does for you for free. The barrier of entry for a blogger to open up their blog and quickly (relative to other sites) connect with other authors, readers and curators. I can't wait until authors figure this part out, but I also can't wait until serious investors get into the space and start to realize that blockchains with actual use-case, scaling issues resolved and genuine activity are not many and some of them have been underappreciated for a long time and are in need of some funding through investing to put them into a new gear for further evolving.
There are some exciting times ahead of us, most of the people I talk to daily agree with me that if they can they try to not sell Steem at these prices. I'm not judging those that do, there are a lot of people stating that they will only be one trade away from Bitcoin back but with many thinking the same thing and liquidity being low I just want to warn people that not everyone will get the chance to jump back in in time before this rocket leaves the atmosphere.