Taking Stock Of 2018

The year 2018 is drawing to a close. It's been quite a journey on Steem. About a year ago, the Steem Backed Dollar pumped insanely starting from the end of November until which time the peg to the USD had held rather nicely. The all-time high was achieved on December 19 2017 when the price of SBD briefly hit almost $14. STEEM followed suit and hit an ATH on January 3 2018.It took STEEM about a month and a half to rocket from about $1 to about $8 last year. Both the price of SBD and STEEM have been correcting slowly for the entire year since last January. When Bitcoin broke below $6000 last month, that caused STEEM to crash from 80 cents to its current 25 cents. That also broke the SBD to USD peg. For many weeks now, Steem witnesses have manipulated the price feeds so that the SBD to STEEM conversion function be kept working as the system thinks the ratio of marketcap-of-SBD to marketcap-of-STEEM is at 10%. What's interesting about the correction is that while the pump was violent, the correction has not been. Keeping in mind that mainly Steemit Inc has been forced to keep constantly selling large amounts of STEEM to cover its operating costs, the slow correction seems to indicate to me that STEEM has not been bought up only by short-term speculators but investors who have belief in the long-term future of the ecosystem.

Personally, it has been most rewarding to become an active Steemian. I have pretty much stopped using social media other than Steem apps. I have no inclination to waste any time doing it for free when I can do the same on Steem apps and earn cryptocurrency. Thanks to Steem, I have taken up photography as a new hobby this year. I started out studying and practicing the basics of composition using just my phone camera. In October, I bought a real camera. @harkar suggested that I be accepted on the Operation Curation Bot white list when they were looking for new people to add to the list. About a week before Christmas, they accepted me. Thank you @harkar and the OCB team! I feel that I'm going to have to earn my place on the list, which means that that my photography posts will have to be as good as I can make them. I will probably buy a camera stand and some macro extension tubes to be able to step up my game in the future. That way I won't even have to leave home to find stuff to photograph!

In the beginning of the year, embarked on two 365's, one of which (the facts series) I stopped doing early in the summer. Now I'm thinking about discontinuing English Phrasal Verbs because my time is limited and I have more urgent things to do. Engagement has gone down in the last couple of months partly because of activity in general going down with the price of STEEM and because HF20 seems have caused people to autovote their favourite authors to time their votes to avoid having their curation rewards going to waste. That has had the side effect of lowering engagement as commenting has become more disconnected from upvoting. When you have to upvote manually, you are much more likely to also drop a comment. The Phrasal Verbs series has suffered from relatively little engagement since the Venezuelans stopped reading and commenting which is why I think it is time to end it and the end of the year is great excuse. If I had unlimited time, I might continue doing it for yet another two and a half months. But I think those 10-20 minutes each morning spent coming up with a PV I have not yet made a post on and scouring the internet for an uncopyrighted picture or a video that suits it are better spent on something else. That said, I'm very grateful to those of my Steemian friends in English speaking countries who have commented and provided additional information on the use of phrasal verbs. Thank you @cryptoandcoffee, @old-guy-photos, @tarazkp and @blanchy and everyone else who has taken the trouble to comment and provide insight. English grammar is not terribly complicated in comparison to, say, German or Russian grammar but it has its pitfalls. New phrasal verbs are constantly adopted while others fall out of use. It seems to me that phrasal verbs are the single most difficult area of English vocabulary as their meaning is hard to decipher from their individual parts and many have multiple meanings depending on context.

I would advise against taking on a 365 at this time because the Steem ecosystem is changing and developing so fast. New apps keep cropping up all the time. Some of them receive large delegations, creating opportunities to earn a lot of STEEM fast.

Below are some of my personal favourites of the photographs I have taken with my new camera this year. Happy New Year! Enjoy!

October

November

December