My Saturday Thoughts

I have to make a trip , about one and a half hours by car, not that much of a trip, but I won't be here until tomorrow afternoon, and as I use a laptop for my internet activities and I won't be taking it with me I will write this post before I leave.

Well Steem is on its fateful trip down to very low levels, at least price wise, so that doesn't look good, I don't expect any good news right now, all cryptos depend on BTC and I haven't heard of any news that will make BTC rebound in the near future, so I, at least, expect prices to be real low for a few months.

Talking about that, isn't it crap that right now when SBD's are probably going to be worth a lot more than STEEM, we are not going to be making any of them? Yes, all we are getting paid now is STEEM and SP, so even there, we users are not going to be able to profit.

Somebody said that this is the time to stock up on SP as with the price down we will get better payouts. I wonder where that person got that idea from, as far as I can see if STEEM's price is down, vote value is down, so you will, obviously get less money per payout than when STEEM's price is higher.

Then we have Hard Fork 20, I have been on Steemit for two years so I must have been through most Hard Forks, and as far as I can remember none of them have improved the user experience, in fact the only change that had a positive impact on users was when they changed the payout to I believe, linear, sorry I am not to good with crypto jargon, well when that was implemented my vote's value jumped about 4 times, every vote I gave was worth about $0.20 at that moment, but that was very short lived we were back to the same value a few weeks later.

Still on the hard fork I commented that these hard forks were done without asking for any input from users, well the guy who was posting told me that that was why my vote for witnesses was so important I should only vote for those who I think are doing what I think is right.

But the thing is in the witness world my vote is not important, if you look at this graph you will see witnesses are decided on by at the most 20 voters, the rest of us are just there to make it look like a democracy I guess. These are the top 21 witnesses who will decide if the Hard Fork is approved.

The dark blue is @freedom, this vote is decisive as you can see, then there are big voters with different vote values and at the end in pale blue are the votes the rest of us have given. Now to make changes you just have to have the big voters agreeing and talking with the witnesses and then you have a hard fork. Is this good or bad? I have no idea, but it sure as hell blows away the idea that this is a decentralized platform, because a few big guys decide what is done.

Do I have a problem with that? No, actually I have very little technical knowledge so anyone can run circles around me and I wouldn't know, so the only choice that leaves me with is to suck it up, and hope these decision taking guys know what they are doing. Now the problem I see, is that they will of course first of all make sure that any change they make is to their benefit, we as users with no power come as a second thought.

Looks more and more like how the world is run, right?

Anyway, what really matters to me, at least on Steemit is to make some money, and with the price STEEM is at right now, I stand to make very little. So I hope these witnesses do implement changes that will pump the price.