Is the door open?

My brother asked me this tonight and asked me to make sure it was locked when I came down to start working.

Here I was thinking that I went pretty heavily into the CUB pool and so far I own 0.18% of the supply. Well, I guess it is better than my steem network ownership, which with 213000 is around 0.0005% of the total supply of steem. Not exactly high-rolling, but considering my individual account is in the top 100 holder accounts on steem, it goes to show that there is actually quite a lot of distribution across the userbase. With the final reduction in inflation rate down to 1 CUB a block, it looks like I am not going to be adding significantly to what I hold now percentage-wise. Some people must have gone in very heavy.

I sit here looking at all of these numbers at times thinking,

"what the hell am I doing? I don't like numbers!"

But I do - I am just not very good at working with them, once they start to get out of the ranges where I can imagine them as slices of pizza and pieces of oranges. I have a pretty good "intuition" when it comes to numbers that I can visualize, but once they get large, it is hard for me to grasp, so I use a lot of rounding and simplest form to align it with my abilities. I know some people are very, very precise, but I think that many spend far too much time trying to maximize, while they miss other values on the table.

With prices increasing, a lot of people start to look back at their past opportunities - or is that "passed" opportunities? You know, "I should have bought at xx cents" or, "I should have posted more often" or, "if I had worked a little harder" - ok, that last one is a little far fetched, as most people do not think about working more, even when imagining their past.

If the future value of steem is significantly higher for example, pretty much everyone who has been posting and earning up until now will have overvalued payouts. A lot of people say things like "I could flip burgers for more money" which is likely true, but also stupid, because if they were willing to flip burgers for more money, they would be. If it is about the money, most jobs will outperform steem for earnings, but at some point, that won't be true.

It is of course silly to look too far into the future at the value of steem, but hypothetically, if steem suddenly was sitting at 5 dollars, my account value would be around one million worth, and it has been a little over four years that I have been adding to it through my experience, delivery and work. Is all that activity worth a million in four years?

Unlikely, but this is the asymmetry that comes with working in a new industry as an early adopter. 1 million dollars is about 830 thousand euros. Split over 4 years, that is about 200K a year or, five times an average salary in Bangladesh. At a million dollars, what that would effectively mean is that I would have earned 20 years of salary in 4.

That doesn't seem possible, but it is potentially possible because of that asymmetry in early adoption and this is why so many people are attempting to get people to hold long, as it could be life-changing for a lot of people. There is nothing wrong with people spending their earning now, but it effectively takes away most of the benefits of early adoption, as it leaves the multiplier of industry growth on the table.

When I say that our value is warranted because of the future value of the industry, a lot of people don't seem to understand how that works. From a steem perspective, if there were no holders, steem would not survive, as its use case is about building a community and the exchanges are about individual gain for the most part, as everyone trading is pretty much an invisible stranger to everyone else. When it comes to something like Bitcoin, it is the 10,000 pizzas that show the potential of the value, but it is all the other people who see that potential and decide they are going to take part and support the growth. I would predict that a lot of the first people into Bitcoin, aren't nearly as well-off as many would imagine them to be considering the current price, because most would have sold much of what they held, as even they couldn't imagine the future price at 60,000 dollars.

This is the thing with most of the industry now, as while we can talk about and dream about something like 100 dollar steem, we can not really imagine what that would look like in reality. Can you imagine the steem network being valued at 40 billion dollars? It seems far fetched, but remember that people couldn't imagine the thousands of BTC they had being worth more than a couple of pizzas at one point.

I can't accurately imagine 100 dollar steem either, but if it did happen to get there, the last four years of work I have done to get to 213,000 steem staked would amount to 21.3 million dollars, or about 5M a year or, 4.1M euros or, 100 times the average yearly salary in Bangladesh. *every year. If it hit 100, how much steem would I have left, or did I sell at 5, 10, 20?

All of these numbers seem crazy and are definitely unimaginable, until you consider that this kind of thing has happened a with the development of every industry that has ever been created. Like those that went in early and big on CUB a couple weeks ago, they are going to benefit from all of the multipliers across the network. Firstly, it will be the lack of competition in the "field" and then it is the over-valued APR that entices more to come in, and then it is the stacking of users, then it is the development of secondary use cases for what they have helped develop, then it is the growth of those networks to be valuable and then it is the compounding of all of these things together to create a massive gain for an individual, but a drop in the ocean for the industry.

Early adoption is risky, because it is very easy to lose more than money, but also time, effort, energy and numerous other things along the way, but it is the multiplier effects, the compounding of combinations of value-adding activities, that makes it so lucrative. Asymmetries are hard for us to visualize, especially over time, but I hope that people realize that the opportunity to be an early-adopting investor in the development phase of a world changing industry, doesn't likely come knocking more than once in a lifetime.