Finally Powering Down my Steem. Enough is Enough!
I Just Can't Anymore.
It's with great sadness (and disgust) that I have finally decided that it's time to power my Steem down.
I've never powered down a single time since I joined in July 2017, but I can no longer keep watching my investment as it whittles down to nothing. (Currently at a 93% loss even though I've consistently grown my account for 2 years)
I'm not saying that I'm full out quitting, but I'm not leaving what little value I have left locked up. Of course, by the time I'm done powering down it will likely have lost another 50% in value.
Don't Piss in the Wind and Tell Me It's Raining
The the top witnesses and the owners of Steemit continue to sell off massive amounts every week for whatever the current market price is, while they do nothing to improve the platform as a whole. Where the hell are SMTs? Just more broken promises. Well, I suppose you did give us banner ads and a down-vote button. Way to go!
Who the fuck runs a business like this? I'll tell you who. Someone who gets paid regardless of whether or not it succeeds. If it fails, who cares? I made a ton of money in the meantime.
I think that the last straw for me was seeing that post by @aggroed where he basically explains to us why Steem is so resilient, because you know, the top witnesses are making about $36k per year even at this low price.
We should all be so happy, you see, because the witnesses are profitable. As long as witnesses are making so much profit, they'll keep their servers online because they'll be able to keep selling and driving the price down.
Well guess what? The rest of us are not earning shit. That $36,000 per year is being paid for by people like me who have poured $1000s of dollars worth of real money into this platform. I can't even look my wife in the face and explain to her why I traded my bitcoins for Steem. How do I even explain that?
I am so fed up with the bot runners, circle jerking early-adopting whales who write 2 line meme posts which they upvote to oblivion, and free-riding top 20 witnesses who act like they do such tough job while giving people a hard time for spreading 'FUD' about what a shit show this is. I am not witness bashing, I'm just reminding you of how lucky you are to be in the top 20. It's not because you are so damn amazing and altruistic. Admit that it's easy money and stop pretending like like you're doing some kind of full time job running a block producing node. It's really easy to spin up a witness node with basic skills on a linux command-line. You can go from nothing to syncing the blockchain in just a few minutes. The rest is a popularity contest.
Stay positive, you say! HODL!
Whatever hypocrites. You guys are constantly cashing out, don't give me that shit. We wouldn't be on our way back to 20 cents if you people truly gave a shit about Steem. We've never been so bad against the Bitcoin from what I can tell. Do you think we are all just thick? Well, we kind of are, since we keep buying more while you keep selling it to us. We are like rabbits chasing a dangling carrot that constantly grows smaller and smaller.
I'm truly sorry that it has come to this. By posting this I expect to get one (or more) of three responses:
- Flagged for "FUD" (I'm making things worse by complaining)
- Condescending rebukes for powering down after 1.5 years of consistent loss (I have weak hands, and will miss out on the great riches to come!)
- Ignored (I'm not popular enough to be a threat. Just another loser who doesn't get it. I was only here for the low hanging fruit and the good times - which I never experienced because Steem has been in free fall since I first purchased it.)
I really tried guys. I mean really tried. I was super active, posted almost every day. I was hopelessly optimistic. Only recently I started to do the short daily Actifit posts out of sheer exhaustion from putting in so much work building great travel posts that earned merely a few bucks. I traded well over $50,000 of bitcoin for Steem. I also traded 1.5 million ENJ for steem which would now be worth 1/4 million dollars had I held onto it. And now, I'm stuck with 23K nearly worthless tokens to show for all my faith in this platform. Oh, and I didn't even count the months of $2000 electric bills for mining ETH which I converted to Steem.
If I could just have those Bitcoins and ENJ back now.. Wow. Don't you dare give me shit about weak hands.
I lost everything HODLing this coin.
So yes, I paid a few Witness salaries with all those Steem tokens that I bought at $5-7 apiece. All that time and money down the drain. I met a few great people on here which is awesome. But I've finally realized what all of this is; a source of easy money for witnesses and Stinc, and a big hard kick in the face to the rest of us. It's not exactly a Ponzi scheme, at least not intentionally, but it definitely has some of the characteristics.
I don't hate any of you for trying to make a buck. We all are! I get upset because of the dishonesty and disingenuous optimism for the platform while massively selling off coins every day and knowingly making no progress on promised updates. Don't patronize us by giving us shit for complaining/FUDing when it is well deserved criticism. Does anyone think that any real CEO would be able to keep his job running a company in this manner?
@ned, ruminate on that one while you're inappropriately strumming your guitar during the next important meeting. For fuck's sake dude.
I am truly sorry if I've upset anyone with this post. But sadly I just don't see things getting any better; at least not in the near term. The thing is, things may get a lot better someday. Perhaps Steem will fly to the moon! But that will not fix the underlying problems plaguing this system and the indifferent people who are running it. No one should get brownie points because Steem follows BTC on it's meteoric rise. You can't just stop working on your business because it's a slow year - but that's what I see happening. It really just isn't a sustainable strategy.
EDIT: The fact that this post has received $9.48 thus far (31 Steem at current prices), when my usual posts get between 2-$4 leads me to believe that I'm not alone in my frustration. I also thought that I should clarify - I'm not leaving, just powering down about 1/2. I may even end up buying back in after some fancy trading. But letting my coins continually lose value while my piece of the pie gets smaller and smaller is just not wise.
Those idiots can't do math. While all of them are earning more Steem, they have less and less dollars. Idiots... Since 1.1.2018 steem was falling down 5% - per day! No matter what you were doing your dollars were going down.
Thank you all commy, socialists and anarchists, you managed to screw up virtual economy as well.
As always, finally you made us equal. Equally poor :D
Thank you incompetent, insecure zeros, 100% losers in real life for being so stupid to chase away all quality authors. Now you are back where you shold be. On the very bottom. Back to mediocre jobs fallen students, single moms...
I've pulled up some and bought btc, ltc but I was also too late.
Thank you community gods for your legacy. After pouring 20k per month for 30 months - what is your legacy, morons? You could buy 10 Ferrari cars. That would make more sense.
Damn this was a rant
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It's always great fun to blame socialists for everything, I get that, but in this case, there were quite a few hard-core capitalists fucking up Steemit. Credit where credit is due.
I haven't seen any capitalism here, because there was no product. There was no free market either.
What I have seen was USSR 101
Money is controlled by Stalin
It's redistributed to communities in the form of steem power.
Winners were chosen just because, although there were no plans nor parameters to calculate if the spendings were reasonable
There was no goal, just some narrative
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You lost already 93%. Losing 100% feels exactly the same, believe me. So you basically lost everything and have no risk at all anymore. Why not just leave for a while and come back one year later?
You can thank me in 2020... quitting now is the worst time ever. Yes, steem could crash to 10 cents, but not for more than a week...
Reality check: actually you lost nothing yet because you didn't sell low yet. Paper losses are no losses until you realize them.
Just wait one more year...
.
Pigs can fly.
Once the user base becomes too small - price will be 0.0001 $
The daily userbase is growing. This year we went from 40k to 50k daily active users.
sry but this is not true. The userbase of steemit for example is declining steadily and today we hit another low of 3400 Users
the whole network saw 13k users today. World wide ... Once just steemit was a global top 2000 Website.
Powerdown and migrating to another platform is not equal to sell at a low! Its rational.
And consider the amount of bots and multiple accounts, so the real number of unique users is way under 3400.
I'll advise you to be rational then ;-) asap.
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I don't know, archange's stats are showing a downward trend, Alexa as well
it just needs to be cleaned. Like the EU needs to be cleaned. Its a mirror of society. Lies and lies to save the establishment which puts money in their pockets without creating value.
Says who?
Just be aware that this is how a market fundamentally works. It will test your limits, playing on your greed and fear to levels that seem almost metaphysical, as if it is making its moves based on your decisions, alone, and that's because this is a well-oiled-machine that has taken over a century to perfect. The game is moving your wealth into the whales' wallets and the method is to make their move one day or week after most of the participants have given up, making more money on those people later FOMOing back in.
Of course, there will be those assets/ stocks/ cryptos that just go down and down and continue to under-perform until they are essentially worthless, which is why it would be horrible advice to suggest that you should just HODL in any context. But just know that you won't be the first to literally sell it all on the very day that the next big move up starts, because that's a common occurrence for any random market participant, that's the big money game participants (or "smart money") showing how successful they've become at reading the market cues (collective psychology of the majority).
In the top 100 of Alt-coins there are now 20 coins at their all time low against bitcoin. Some of them looked very promising a year ago. 5-10 others are in the red zone. Big shake-out of the Alt-coins has begun? If this is so, how to determine if Steem is not one of those coins that will slowly dissapear?
Short answer, we don't have any way to know that it won't be one of the losers. More nuanced answer (suggestion), weigh what fundamentals you can gather, compare and contrast what Steem has to its competitors and determine for yourself whether it deserves to be in its current position. Invest or speculate accordingly.
I've always been a diversify your portfolio type of dude (you could even say a conservative speculative investor), so this under-performance of Steem hasn't really been of much concern to me, especially since I've been heavily hedging my position in EOS, which has been performing relatively well.
Very simple. When the Flagship product, Steemit, is not able to create a solid base of users even by paying them - you realize how wrong that is.
It would be the same as to be rejected by a prostitute. Man... There must be something very, very wrong in that case
I totally understand what you're saying and am fully aware of this psychological element.
I'm sure that if everything were mooning right now I'd be a happy camper - oblivious of the underlying failings of the platform and its management. But that is the problem isn't it? When the market is doing well, it's full steam ahead with development. When the market is bearish, they just stop developing. But they don't stop selling. What kind of crap is that? We are losing value at a faster rate than other top 100 alts. Why else are we down to 60 from 50?
I will never FOMO back in, I am confident a new site will come along and destroy this place.
Indeed, if some people get together and find out a product that can offer something extra besides FB, YT, twitter etc. and that is easy and pleasant to come back to and lets you earn a buck or 2 in a transparant matter without giving you the feeling that you're left out or screwed, then such a platform will take off and Steemit will be nothing else than a forgotten dream that turned into a nightmare, while Steem will be just one of these crypto platforms competing with other ones.
Nobody can hate on you for powering down. I admit I'm depressed as fuck. I spent 2 1/2 years blogging on this site every day. Maybe we will go back up, maybe we won't. Maybe you will immediately be frustrated as soon as you pull out. Maybe you won't.
I think there's a good chance that we are going to go all the way down to $0.20 or even lower. I think there's a good chance that the new platform based on EOS is going to give us a run for our money. I think most of the people that are cheerleading and saying everything is fine while covering their eyes are not doing the rest of us any favors.
The real problem is selling at these prices. Do you really want to sell steem at $0.29 when you bought it at 5 to 7 dollars? I know that i don't but at the same time i don't want to lose everything either.
When eos ramps the social layer, I have to believe this place will be very quiet.
All Alts are down Sir and not just STEEM, but they are not actually down, just holding their dollar value against BTC because btc is mooning, soon ALTs will moon too. It is just a cycle and STEEM will rise again. But I get your point and understand your situation but I am got upset by this post.
Just HODL
I know buddy, sorry I upset you. I do plan to continue posting, but I have got to try doing a little trading and get some of my money back. I have nothing to lose at this point.
If it were just the markets, I'd feel a bit better about it, but it is the whole management of Steem and the things that I mentioned in the post. The worst part is that progress has all but stopped on the development of the platform. I feel like this is why steem is losing value even faster than other alts (it dropped to 60th place)
Yeah same here bro. Been inactive the last 5months mainly because I didn't see any point in investing so much time into Steemit since it won't get a man anywhere in the current state. Again same thing, broken promises such as SMT's.
I have kept my steem at 8k though and just been selling my votes gaining my passive income and been selling a bit here and there and the price swings up and down. I'm using the system to my own advantage now like everyone else because fuck it. :) They made the system based on bots and voteselling so I'm just gonna do that if that's how the witnesses wants it. I cannot just like you be bothered to fight it anymore.
It's nice however, coming back to my wallet from time to time and see I suddenly have a bunch of sbd and steem laying there to be sold. So maybe try that instead? As you say yourself, the value of steem right now is laughable and I think 99% of people of lost a lot by now. so maybe don't go full on quit and just start put your time and energy elsewhere and put your votes to sell on smartsteem and cash out what you sell? Of
Just a suggestion to not make it feel too sour everything. Hopes everything is well otherwise for you though! Cheers mate!
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Hey! @holm my man. How's it going, brother, long time no see.
I don't plan to power down all of my Steem; only about half. I was hoping to try to do some fancy trading and get some of my money back. Yeah, it's great getting that cash passively. My big issue is that although my post says "$5" or something, by the time I cash out it will be more like 2 cents.
And I get it. The alt market is taking a dive. But Steem shouldn't be dropping at a faster rate than a lot of the market. I blame that on shitty management.
I'm still trying to work out in my head what I'd like to do about all of this. I'm just sick of watching my funds drain!
If you have enough fiat left, I'd buy me a few Bitcoins. They will go up anyway. And trade with 10-20% of them. Forget about this time-sink called Steemit and move on.
Damn. It's not my personality to give people shit for what they do with THEIR money, and I can definitely empathize with your frustration. I've never powered down since I've been here a little over a year, but my investment was nowhere near what yours was.
I still feel like it can go either way with Steem. I don't think we're going to see much in the short term though. I think if SMT's came out tomorrow it wouldn't make much difference in the short term. SMT's would be a beginning, not an end. So we just got centralized SMT's, so we'll see how that goes, and now Steemit is about done with MIRA, and says SMTS are next. Who knows whether they can come through.
My opinion is that I'm not really judging Steem on the stuff that's out right now. All this shit is super "beta" and not made for mass consumption, but what I do see are developments in the infrastructure, things like MIRA and the last hardfork that ultimately just make the blockchain stronger and more resilient. I think that resilience is a big strength because there is a lot of opportunity for people to build great things here, and the features that will (hopefully) come soon will expand on that even more. As long as there's opportunity, I think more people will come and take their shot. Like all things, most people will fail, but as long as the system doesn't, you only really need one winner to completely turn everything around. Either way it's a gamble.
Even if you're not heavily staked anymore drop back in and check on the rest of us rabbits chasing that microscopic carrot. :)
Understand your frustration nuthman. yep when vote swapping, using curation bots or self voting to effectively mine the most steem rule, it's more like boofhead of brain. wish you all the best.
Thanks man. It makes me sick that it has come to this. It hurts pretty bad.
Thanks man. It makes me
Sick that it has come to this.
It hurts pretty bad.
- nuthman
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
Omg fuck you haiku bot. Lol!
Lmao that haiku is the pinnacle of artistry
Then join us in https://whaleshares.io/ where using curation bots or self voting (you get only 1/3rd of self-vote) are not allowed.
no never! gunna downvote you for swearing lol
It looks like it could be a good time to buy back some of that bitcoin. Yeah it would have been better to keep the bitcoin originally. No more putting all your eggs in one basket. Keep things diversified, right?
Sorry to hear it man. You are one of my favorite bloggers here 😪
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You are one of mine as well! You are one of the few getting decent support, which is awesome as I feel that you really deserve it. It just isn't working out for me, sadly.
well the good news is that it is gonna take you a long time to power down, maybe some magic will happen in that time and you'll change your mind. fingers crossed :)
That is true!