Was it worth it?
I spent a few minutes having a look at the various crypto assets I hold and was thinking about what it would all need to be valued for me to consider the last 3 years "worth it" finincially.
I don't need a lot - but if I sold everything I hold now, *not much in my life would change.
Sure, I could pay off debts and be a bit more comfortable, but it wouldnt last long and very soon I would be back where I am today. What would the point of that be?
I am looking for a significant change and today's market prices don't being me that. However it wouldn't take much for that to happen. Currently, the only major debt I have is our apartment mortgage and it is manageable. However the maintenance costs on this apartment are ludicrous. It would be nice to get our own place one day, but there is no rush on that.
A couple years ago I could have paid off the apartment with my holdings, but that would have required a full power down and as a believer, I kept powering up anyway. Paying off the mortgage might have been a smart move, but I wonder if I would have used the savings each month to buy back into Steem.
This is often what people forget when looking at counterfactuals, as they assume that they would have acted a certain way, even though history proved they didn't. How many have stated how many Bitcoins they once had and if they had "sold at the high" they would have so and so, but don't factor in that they didn't hold, they sold much, much earlier.
While some lament the decisions of their past, for me I am pretty solid that I did the best I could at the time, knowing what I knew. Will I know better next time? Probably.
I think that during the next real alt coin run Steem is going to see some massive gains and could surpass the last all time high considerably under the right conditions. The right conditions are more knowledgeable investors who will buy into development pedigree, not hype.
Most of the 3000 tokens or whatever it is in the marketplace are walking dead coins, they just don't know it yet. I am going to lose a bit once they fail completely, I hold several just in case though. Most have nothing to offer, likely never will.
If STEEM goes to zero, I am okay with that, but I do not think it will because, there will always be enough people both holding and willing to buy STEEM low. The lower it goes, the higher the demand on the market will go. Steem is going to be hard to kill because there is a community of people backing it, and many of them enjoy what they can do on Steem with STEEM. It might drop a lot more, but I doubt it will approach zero.
I am.looking forward to lower prices where large accounts especially are still selling. I am hoping for more midsizze accounts to buy in and up, more dolphins that give a shit. It would be great to be able to have many active dolphins curating all over the ecosystem.
But, considering all the effort and late nights put into Steem, I wouldnt consider the price of selling now as anywhere near worth it financially. However, there has been massive amount of value in the time I have spent here writing, conversing, learning and thinking. When price increases significantly, that is just going to be the icing on the cake.
I am. In no rush and I am happy for the investment to marinate and mature into something compelling and stable, rather than living in hope for a pump to sell. How long can I wait? Longer than most I predict.
Luckily, waiting on Steem needn't be a passive activity and price is only one aspect of what makes Steem "worth it".
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
Let it marinate.
It is going to be very, very tender :D
It looks like, hehe.
Maybe will just melt away.
just a light broth.
When my wife first got me to take a look at steem, I agreed, I told her I would give it three months to see if it was a Social Media type site that I could like. It was, and I have enjoyed my time here, at that three month mark I decided I did like it and then told myself if I am still here in 5 years I would think about learning how to buy and withdraw steem from-to-fiat.
I still have not taken the plunge to learn how to buy steem, I really should but that would mean I would also be able to wtihdraw steem, and life sometimes can get frustrating, and things can also get frustrating on steem. When we get frustrated we react, we don't often stop to think. So just under 3 years til the 5 year mark, and the next steem decision.
I was CPU mining btc way back when the diff was that low, but didn't keep it going for similar reasons. Ironically, I DID keep my keys safe and can still access that account :). I must admit that I do sometimes kick myself for not spending more spare cycles on it...
20/20 hindsight vision, we all have it, at least you kept your keys, and that which was not mined was not really lost. I figure in three years I will be kicking myself for not learning how to buy and withdraw any crypto coins, but I do not think it will be the end of the world if I do. Surviving the frustration is sometimes not an easy thing. Every day I want to quit steem block chain, especially when I get 8 completely meaningless down votes on a post, but I eventually shake it off and keep on posting, granted at a much slower rate sometimes, but I still try to get those three or four a week out.
Never looked into mining, but I wonder how much is lost from people that decided it wasn't worth it and misplaced their keys.
I got started in mining mostly because I was looking for something useful to do with my extra CPU cycles when I wasn't using my computer :). When it became something you needed specialized hardware to get any real return, I lost interest in it (mostly because I wasn't interested in making that kind of investment in it).
No doubt there are MANY out there who have lost their keys to a significant amount of crypto! I'm too much of a digital pack-rat for that :)
I wish I was a nerd ;D
I have heard that for BTC it is something like 20% and I would imagine on Steem it is quite significant also.
I didn't know your wife got you into Steem.
Buying Steem is easy enough, for those who value Steem, withdrawing is harder. :)
For me, I have disconnected my Steem frustrations from powering down quite early on. I am not much of a kneejerk reaction kind of person though.
Years ago, my right index finger was hovering over a button. I had already entered my debit card information and was almost ready to buy $100 worth of Bitcoin at a crazy high price of $0.47 per Bitcoin. I hesitated. And decided it was too risky of a speculation. Saved myself $100.
Today, it doesn’t bother me at all that it would now be valued at $1.6 million.
Because, at the time, I was clueless about the importance of private keys. After having spent $100, I would have almost certainly moved it to someplace like Mt. Gox for safekeeping.
There are so many similar stories, but people conveniently forget their own nature :)
What would have been interesting for steem is if people like yourself has been aware from the start and got in/ bought in at the lows. I wonder what it would look like if instead of a handful of techies and maximalists, there were 1000 community orientated people instead.
I'm with you but I am not powering up anymore and finding value in having liquid steem. I'm not sure why exactly but I feel it in my gut. i just feel like I'm more nimble being liquid but I have no intention of selling my steem because it is still what allows me to increase the number of tokens I hold.
I keep a little liquid or liquidish to play with, but at these prices I am not going to sell anyway. Keeping my SP active brings me more value personally - although it doesn't maximize my stack growth.
So what is the lower price you think, it will go ? I am planning to invest some more in steem, so any guidance would help. Right now its at 12 cents, do you think, it will still go down further ?
No idea, but I would assume that it is likely going to go lower in satoshis at some point as BTC rises and Steem lags by a week or two.
Exactly, it is a good possibility I would be using Steemit and other Steem apps even if Steem was worth nothing. As long as the people and communities remained.
I believe in the future of Steem and the blockchain. So right now, at lows, I am just trying to buy, buy and buy when I can.
Pretty sure there are enough people here now that would make it through very low prices.