Decided to stop renting delegated steem from Blocktrades.

So for the last several months I have been renting delegated steem from Blocktrades in a continual loop...

This has, for the most part, been a very failed experiment.

I was hoping that If I rented a bunch of steem power from Blocktrades and sold my votes on smartsteem, that I could continually rent more steem power every day to the point that my initial rental would be replaced or better at the end of 90 days.

This turned out not to be the case at all. Not only did I not hit my initial steempower rental at the end of 90 days, but it came very short.

Ever since then I have been continuing to extend or "re-rent" as much of my delegation as possible but have only seen my steempower slowly decline as my earnings are not enough to cover all of the costs.

I may make a more in-depth post one this in the future where I try to figure out exactly how much I spent and how I made (in the way of curation rewards) but the bottom line is that I think I lost a good bit of steem doing it this way and would not suggest anyone else try this method.

The funny part is, that I actually think I am almost to the point of balance, to where what I am making will cover what I am spending to re-rent the steem power that I have.

But I am still not sure that it is worth it because I have to re-invest all of my sold votes to even get to that point.

So I have decided to just let it all go. I know that I am going to loose some money this way, and it is a little sad to see my steempower drop a little bit every day as it expires.

But... and this is a big but... I feel so much more free and happy now. I can upvote and interact with the community again!.

What I had essentially done is trapped myself into a box of endless re-investing, and that to me is not in the spirit of steem.

I made a post the day before yesterday and upvoted every single person who commented on it, just because I could, and that felt Great! I no longer have to be sooo stingy with my votes, and that makes me very happy.

I hope that this was helpful to someone! In the meantime I am going to enjoy my voting freedom.