So I'm a Dolphin Now

^{Let's pretend this is a dolphin.}

I still remember when six months ago I made an growth update: I was half a dolphin with 2500 Steem Power. And April 2018 over a year ago I was 1/5th of a dolphin with 1000 SP – a nice round number and a major milestone at the time.

Hmm... 5000 SP by the 2nd Anniversary could be a goal to aim at.

This I said earlier in March this year when looking at the pattern of my SP accumulation and noticing how the compounding effects were starting to kick in, and it actually wasn't too far off since my anniversary was just couple weeks ago.

This is how the graph looks as of today:

^{A beautiful exponential curve :)}

Never thought I would come at this point so soon, but the price action has certainly helped, because on top of less competition on the reward pool when instant gratification seekers are gone, I've been buying in with the fiat that I'm generating from my job. @ocdb – the brainchild of @acidyo meant to distribute stake for solid authors – has been a major help also.

With the current trend it seems I'm doubling my stake roughly every 6 months – and should that trend hold, I'd have 10,000 SP by March 2020 which is sort of nuts to think about. Though it remains to be seen, because Hard Fork 21, coming today, is going to shake up the economics a bit, but I will be happily going at it with my stake when the curation shifts to 50/50.

It's been a wild ride, but recently things have started to click in my head, and I unloaded the gun that I was loading for 2 years: I explained Steem to some of my friends.

They did know that I post and earn some crypto here, but they had no idea about the big picture: Web 3.0, monetization of personal data, users having the ability to take ownership of the Internet together as a community instead of being at the mercy of big centralized authorities. This, and everything to the details of the economics, technology, upcoming DAO in Hard Fork 21, decentralized apps and witnesses who secure the chain, I explained in detail, as well as I could anyway. I was barely eating my kebab while explaining this, and I hadn't even touched Smart Media Tokens and Steem-Engine tokens yet...

"Oh, did I forget to mention that Steem has 7th most developers, yet is in the 80s according to coinmarketcap?"

Why did I take so long? Well, I like to understand what I'm talking about, and I knew my understanding hadn't been deep enough where I could've conveyed the whole deal understandably, hence I never made too big of an attempt to get any of my friends involved. Hell, 2 years of studying Steem and I still don't know all the stuff going on here – and it's going to be increasingly hard to keep track of everything when the ecosystem spreads its tentacles, but the good thing is that the regular user in the future needs not know anything of the technicalities of Steem and Steem Power, because the only thing they need to know is make posts, earn tokens. Notice how I said tokens and not Steem, because Steem won't be the center of attention, especially for earnings, but it is the resource that powers the whole ecosystem.

Light accounts – that make onboarding seamless – (and SMTs too?) are planned for the following Hard Fork 22, and that is a time when we could see some massive action taking place. Things are not yet where they are supposed to be, bidbots have distorted Trending (2.5 free flags coming in HF21 are to address that though) and SMTs have been talked about for 3 years, however, once they launch, people will quickly forget how it took a bit longer than supposed to. People invest 20+ years in other methods, yet expect things to explode here in a year. Long-term is even more important with crypto, because of extreme volatility.

I think my timing was pretty good, because Steem is dirt cheap right now around $0.18 (16 cents in EUR) where, let's say, for 50€ you can get about 310 STEEM. That 310 cost about $2480 during the all-time-high. Even if that STEEM ends up 10x at "only" $1.8 in five years (which is like the most conservative prediction anyone will give – excluding the doomer gloomers who say it is going to zero), it will be a 900% return on your investment, and probably the best investment of your life. And that is NOT taking into account curation rewards that you will earn in a compounding manner when vesting STEEM into Steem Power. Think: you earn money by tipping authors for their content you enjoy. Also, 15% of the total inflation pool goes to Steem Power holders which atm would grow your Steem Power by about 2% annually, but this will decrease along the decreasing inflation rate and flux depending on other factors. Oh, also you have a chance to get all kinds of tokens in the future airdropped to your wallet by holding Steem Power.

I realize that all this sounds too good to be true, and frankly it is – for the old world where only the people with big money have the opportunity for such opportunities. Crypto (and Steem) will even the game and give more opportunities back to individuals, but of course, people have to take it, cannot force a horse to drink.

I think my 2 years of loading was a success, because I did get couple friends interested, and after Hard Fork 21 I will be making Steem accounts for them once they have thought out a user name – will finally get some use for those free claimed account tickets that I'm able to claim now with the amount of SP I have ;)

Like I've said earlier, if any other of you, my friends, want an account, I can make it for you in a second. I also promise to delegate 100 SP for you, meaning that you will have the ability to vote with that 100 SP as if it's yours (and earn some curation rewards). This will also give you the ability to transact more than enough, so you won't even have to buy any if you don't want to, however, the risk vs. reward seems very good to me atm.

When Bitcoin was 3 years old in January 2012, its price was about $5. Before that, in 2011, the Bitcoin "bubble" burst from $31 to $2. As of today, in August 2019, Bitcoin is about $10,000 a piece.

I'm not saying Steem is the next Bitcoin, it is far from Bitcoin with its use case being geared toward social actions. Everyone's decisions is their own to make of course, but I'm seeing great things coming for Steem in the future. It could crash and burn, but there's a 3 year track record of increasing development, so take that as you will. The great thing is though, that having Steem also brings influence that can affect the direction where Steem goes, meanwhile Bitcoin is just sitting in your wallet and hoping to appreciate in value.