There seem to be a lot of positive developments going on this month.

For starters, I've seemed to burn out on my crippling video game addiction. In turn, I've dipped my toes back into developing my simple game for Steem. Surprisingly (although it shouldn't be) everything still works and is exactly how I left it.

On the same note, Steemit Inc seems to have put some development effort into making the dsteem api compatible with the upcoming SMT protocol. This is really nice because dsteem is the only api I've put any time into learning, and I was fairly certain it was abandonware, especially considering the original creator of it designed a fork that would burn all of Steemit Inc's stake on the platform. It's nice to see that Steemit Inc hasn't thrown out the most popular API out of spite; shows some class, and now I don't have to learn a different one (SteemJS).

Even today's mini Bitcoin flash-crash is good news from my point of view. It was going up too quickly in my opinion. I still believe we have two more months of relatively upward movement, but if there aren't pullbacks like this one, the run up will burn out much sooner than that.

Looks like the movement was mostly attributed to a lone whale placing a huge sell order. Probably thinks the halving event is already priced in and we are going to fall to the 3-4k level as the halving approaches and miners get scared off by the sudden decreased inflation mechanic. I think this whale is going to be sorely disappointed over the coming months. Not only do I think the price is going up, but also even if it goes down I can't imagine it going less than $7k back to the exponential lower bound.

If you ask me, now is the absolute worst time to be swing trading the market. Gotta give it at least a month and see where we are at. Assuming the market will crash 4 months before the halving event seems like a very big mistake to me. I assume there are droves of whales who were more then willing to pick up this dip and expect it to breach 10k soon™. Personally I expect to be 9k+ again within 4 or 5 days, but again, I'm not making any bets on it so whatever.

As far as Steem is concerned, the market is also pretty interesting. We keep getting these extremely thin wicked candle spikes upward that in turn crash down. This signals to me that there are a few buyers out there with deep pockets who want to get in, but they don't have the patience to wait for buy orders to complete.

At the same time, there is still a lot of selling pressure. There seems to be a lot of money trying to exit and enter at the same time, and the markets aren't very good at matching them up in a timely manner. It seems like the buyers are more impatient to get in than the sellers are to get out. Interesting indeed.

Steemleo

I've ended up dumping even more liquid Steem into Steemleo during these trying times of 0.125 trading ratios. In total, I ended up buying almost 13k coins... I just now powered that all up. I was going to keep it liquid but waiting a week to get it back almost certainly isn't a big deal. This huge powerup has in turn boosted me to the #7 slot of top stake holders, right underneath @khaleelkazi himself, the creator of the entire network.

I've bumped my upvote value up from 8.5 coins to 11.5 coins, which is a nice feeling considering there are only like 5 million coins total. Perhaps it's not the smartest financial play, but I enjoy supporting the network. Not everything has to be an investment, even on a platform designed for investment.

Conclusion

Things are looking up these days. Here's to a strong rally over the next couple of months, but more importantly lets hope that actual fundamental development continues unabated.