Today is the day when the stars aligned and I made the move that brought me over 48000 SteemPower. This is kind of unreal to say since in order to make that possible just a year back you would have to invest well over 48000 dollars to do that. But what if I told you for me it was not necessarily the lucrative low price that drew me to this decision, but the way steem community managed to change its tracks away from the bottomless hole.
Not only could I not let @slobberchops get all the attention from his own recent upgrade. But there's also just overwhelmingly many reasons to invest in steem once again. Usually I hovered around 8k steempower but in the last 15 months, I have been powering all the way down to 3k SP. Effectively making my account a minnow. While I did explain the reason for that in another post I can shortly summarize it here: From a consumer point of view, you know, those who just like to blog and curate... Steem felt dying, stagnant and artificial. Despite people were still developing within the blockchain it all seemed to be a waste when the very fundamentals were wrong and it felt wrong as a blogger to have invested money into a project where blogging meant more interaction with bots than with actual human beings. Well, this has changed now with the new steem blossoming and I can only imagine it gets better from here.

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So I started writing down on a paper the reasons for and against investing in steem

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To Invest	To not Invest
Steem has 2 times bounced from 10 cents levels	Steem might go to 0
People are showing greed can be controlled	Other cryptos could raise before steem does
Amazing projects developing on the Steem blockchain	Still a lot of skeptical people(although not as many)
HF21 made stacking SP valuable for great curation rewards	mass adoption still not possible IMO.
HF21 turned most bots into manual curators	Steem still fails to attract big inverstors
48.000SP once cost at least 48.000dollars	Steem needs a rebrand?
Steem is the only crypto I actually USE	-
Not gonna break my life if everything turned out wrong	-
Community not dependant on the official steem inc.	-
Steem inc. still stepping up a bit, I guess.	-
Earning steem while waiting for price action is great	-
Development still going strong despite low prices	-
Projects managed to survive soon 1½ year of bear-market	-

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it is always important to be objective on investing matters but I might fail a bit to do it here, although I tried my best!
To me, the most important is looking at the product and see what we can use it for. Steem is already proven to be useful both for basic bloggers like myself(I did, after all, manage to live abroad without a job for 2 years). But ALSO I think it is super vital to see many entrepreneurs who choose to build their own projects on the steem blockchain. That is to me probably the most important aspect. The fact developers are motivated to risk their time and money on building here is something you cannot say of every project out there in the world. Especially not inside of crypto.

Note of "Steem needs a rebrand?": Steem has a big history and sadly a lot of information out there on the internet are giving out the wrong impression of what steem is. I think it is a shame because if you google you will find a lot of very old articles that give out not only skeptical opinions but also being downright wrong if you see what steem is today. People still mistakenly mix "Steemit" and "Steem" as being the same.

Of course, this was just all an idea I had and I did try to imagine a reality where steem would be rebranding itself. Would it then help give people the right information when they are to google up this "newsteem coin"? Steem is so different than what it used to be 3 years ago so it breaks my heart when I see these really old articles flowing around that spreads wrong information.

Food for thought I guess.

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Only the true seniors of steem knows...

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Although when I just started on steem and got hyped about those guys yelling "STEEM TO 100 DOLLARS IN 1 YEAR". I did learn quickly this is absolute bullshit(sorry for the word). However, I do believe what once has happened can happen again and when it comes to markets this is even more important. I am quite sure some of you might have experienced this scenario of steem being at 16 cents a few years back, were also many people wondered "should we buy or quit?".
This is at least the information you see when looking at old articles and posts in 2016/2017, The blockchain never forgets...

It just so happens that steem has indeed been falling down to the levels we see now, twice. Both times just before you would think steem would go to 0 it made a run for 3 dollars and above.
Together with the fact that we see bitcoin dominance being extremely high at over 70% (as of writing this).
This has previously meant that people are starting looking into other coins to put their gains into. This is what I have done with steem in this case.

To me, these factors are secondary and are only a confirmation that things could turn around. The most important really is the direction of the community and the fact we finally made it out of the bid bot era... after almost 2 years of bid bot dominance, steem finally made a turn in the right direction(and oh boy did we turn wrong a lot!).

I just don't think there could have been a better time to see our steem get back on track and despite all odds turn everything around. As I said, the stars aligned for me here and I grabbed the chance.

In the end, there's nobody else than myself I have to convince... And that was quite easy so let us move along to what actually matters.

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I want to put my SteemPower where it matters

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All of this fresh SP and then I actually have found it hard for me to use it all. While I do already support some people before I made this step(lucky those I guess) it is not enough to hold my voting power off 100%. So I guess I have a certain responsibility to use my steempower where it is the most impactful. I see two ways on how I can do this:

1. Headhunt some authors out that make brilliant work. This is how I first started out and some whales/Orcas did vote me above 100 dollars quite a few times. That was all I needed to get steem under my skin; A good bit of recognition. I have also witnessed this is what happened to many others. Where either a dolphin sized account made certain people stick around for more. (trust me, @slobberchops and @steevc almost has a love story in this regard. (not that I am jealous of course... really!) I guess it's not always about the reward, but the recognition from each other and I believe we all can do our part to make steem a bit gluier.

On a note for that I would like to support those that have the same interests as me; that is either some really geeky stuff such as observing space, creative ways of writing and of course the obvious one: Travel & outdoors.

1. I would love to support certain projects in any way I can. For me, I see a lot of sense in supporting @travelfeed and their platform travelfeed.io since they seem to do so much right in order to create a space for travelers to share their knowledge.
   This will, of course, happen through joining their curation trail and also manually upvote people who use their platform directly.

I like the idea of not splitting my SteemPower too thin and make it a bit more impactful so, for now, this is my two main objectives. Let's see how long that will last, I am hoping for a week.

Of course, if you have any suggestions I am happy to check it out.

See you on #newsteem!

-holm