Some history and thoughts about Steem and my activity

With a lot of witness reports going around lately, thought I'd write down some stuff that I've been working on as a curator and a frequent poster to my followers and the platform.

Time have been crazy lately, not just cause of the SBD spike, but the general attention cryptocurrencies are finally receiving. Seems like mainstream adoption is just around the corner and sooner or later everyone will be drawn to it. Feels good to have invested a lot of time onto the platform and be ready to welcome everyone, especially since this blockchain is one of the most advanced and can handle all the new traffic coming in!

I recently had a look at blocktivity.info and Steem is closing in on new record heights in transaction traffic again!

Bitcoin and Ethereum are both struggling with unconfirmed transactions already while the Steem network is only at 0.32% capacity with a team already working on scaling it further! Really exciting times to say the least.

With big attention it means that the blockchains are also getting more and more people wanting to work towards them, we've seen how active utopian is getting and the amount of new developers coming in which we have been lacking for a long time. The progress is nearing exponential levels and with new users and ideas and work load they will be reaching them faster and faster.

It's a bit funny that we have been discussing the curation rewards to post rewards lately and how and if we should change it on the blockchain level as to give curators more incentive to curate better and not just on the most popular authors for increased curation rewards - even though often they miss out on higher rewards cause they end up being the last to vote on popular authors, but that's lazy autovoting curators for you. What's funny is that now with Steem Dollars being worth more than $10 each it seems the gap has become even bigger. I'm sure we are going to find a more fair divide with experimentation, and I doubt the price of Steem Dollars will remain this high for too long.

It gives a good jump start in funding for all the new potential ideas and projects on Steem though, so I hope frequent posters are taking advantage of that - I know I will.

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Ever since I joined Steemit and got active there have been very few days where I haven't cast a vote and I've never used bots to vote for me. As a long time Redditor I felt that the curation incentives the platform gives will be huge in the future - no other platform rewards you to curate actively. Not to mention with more stake depending on your SP instead of 1 vote just being worth 1 which leaves a lot of leeway to game the platform as we have seen being done on Reddit often by bots and so called "vote selling services" which are completely different than the ones we have here.

I started a curation trail early on, it was around the same day that Streemian launched. This was back before delegations existed and it allowed bigger accounts to follow my manual votes knowing I will be distributing the votes wide and doing good with them. To this day I have cast over 42,000 manual votes on the platform and I've only had to change my mouse once!

After delegations I felt I needed to improve my manual voting activity to be able to focus it better on undervalued authors for retention. One curator can only have a certain amount of hours in a day and the influx of new users was becoming overwhelming. So I went out and created the curation project @ocd. With the help of 10 other curators at the start who also received some delegation from me, we have now grown to nearly 40 and have selected around 1,000 unique authors that we have curated and supported.

During all that I've stayed up to date on chats, trying to give everyone a minute to curate their posts while chatting with other active Steemians. Stayed up to date with changes, how everything works and some technical details about the blockchain even though I am not so tech-savvy my self. The userbase is becoming so big that they are being spread all over different chats, steemit.chat, discord, slacks - there are Steemians everywhere and everyone belonging to their own community while everyone is waiting for communities to arrive to the platform. :)

In the meantime I've also focused a lot on mentioning Steem on other platforms, especially during times where the currency wasn't doing so well price-wise. I could've been posting away earning that cheap 10 cent Steem Power like many others were doing, but I decided it would be best to try and get as many new people on here and writing as possible - especially those that did listen and have now landed on something awesome thanks to me and have been rewarded because of it. It's kind of funny that I skipped earning that cheap Steem at 10x lower price yet now I'm able to buy it back at 10x the price of SBD, feels like a second chance of growing my account and for many others as well.

Like I said in a recent post, its completely understandable for users to make the most out of the current SBD prices, I see it as a good way of redistributing Steem Power and it will be very healthy for the platform in the long run. The investors that have been around for a long time and are now powering down are helping distribute the Steem, I'd say keep the price lower for longer even so we have a healthy distribution which is a very strong aspect for a decentralized community - one that not many can say they also do have.

I am glad that @ocd is getting a bit more support lately and that not a big portion of my daily voting power has to go towards it as it will give me a lot of room to spread them out more and start funding some projects on the Steem blockchain that will hopefully become an important part of it in the future. I've promised some of you a new project that I've been working on for some time and I hope to be able to deliver it soon and that the community will love it.

So stay tuned for that and keep on Steeming!

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