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In response to @steve-mcclair's farewell post, I wrote a comment, and it ended up so long that I think it should be posted as a stand-alone post (though I have expanded it a lot as I realised that this has been a core theme in many of my posts so far):

There is a very dark mood in the community of Creators, and farewell posts are starting to become very common recently.

I predicted this was happening about a month ago - it is inevitable, in fact. I am pretty sure that @ned and @dantheman both knew that there would be this difficult phase as it finally dawns on everyone who thought Steem was just about getting paid to write, that this was not a sustainable situation.

You may think, from the subjective data you have in front of you, that there is a rot in the core of the curation scene here, but a tomato seed does not sprout unless the fruit first rots.

My Steem Power is now up over 1250, and in a month's time I get another 1000 for showing up at SteemFEST. I am powering it down but only because I need a little extra, it's not a big amount of money but it will be something to put a smile on my face every week when I start to get a little frustrated that I'm not getting through to people.

I have finally found what could at last be a serious and competent group of investors and developers and we will be working on setting up a Steem Developer Hub in Amsterdam (most probably). A lot of people are concerned that steem is dying, but it was never intended that Steem by itself, and especially not the blog system, was the be-all and end-all of what this project aims at.

A shakeout is inevitable, and necessary

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Even when 95% of the posters are shaken out of the system, and the top 19 witnesses are barely earning enough to operate, the network will still be around. This will be the point at which new developments can really start, and one thing that I have been banging on about since nearly the beginning of my time here:

Steem is not (just) a blogging platform

Steem is not even (just) an ad-hoc public and transparent corporation

Not only is this a transitional process, as some whales engage in stupid, selfish and pointless collusions continue to waste their SP skimming a bit of the pool of rewards for their mates, regardless, those who understand and believe in the bigger mission for the platform, and understand it well, have been gathered together, and they are slowly finding each other and Steem Outposts are going to pop up all over the world, and accelerate development towards the bigger goal.

Steem - from Vapor to Liquid to Solid

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Steem's evolution has been following a process a lot like the condensation and solidification of a cooling vapor, from vapor (pre-beta development and discussion), into the liquid form (what we have now), and the next phase is crystallisation.

I am pretty sure Dan and Ned realised that there would be quite a significant shake-out process through all of this, and that many who they managed to get to join, would not stick around to see it through to the next phase, the physical manifestation, the solidification into a strong and robust but decentralised network of development projects running that build all the very things that anyone who has been following cryptos for a few years, knows have needed to happen but nobody has up to now found a way to make happen.

In fact, what looks bad to many at the moment, is in fact confirmation that a milestone has been reached and the next phase is beginning.

Those who are jumping out, that's perfectly fine, and thanks for your participation in the project up to this point, you have been very helpful and thanks to your help, within a year you will all see how important you have actually been, even if you were not rewarded a hell of a lot in the process. Don't throw away your login keys just yet though. As a comment points out below this post, you could come back here in 6 months time, and suddenly discover that your reward was inordinately larger than you expected, with some time in maturation.

Steem will probably bottom out at maybe even as low as USD$0.20 before the next wave of momentum kicks in, I have been saying this for at least 6 weeks now. Once a realistic valuation is found, investment will flood in, and if you thought Steem was revolutionary, just wait until Steem has enough Power to persuade governments to accept identity documents issued by us as valid passports.

It's going to happen, even if it seems like Steem dwindles away to a shadow of its former self. The hype is about what it can be, not about what it is. To become what it can be, it has to be refined into its pure, solid form, and then from there, it will start to grow really fast.

A hint at what Steem will eventually become

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(albeit in a somewhat dangerous context... and like this little tacker pictured above, that's how life is for the small and new...)

https://steemit.com/agorism/@l0k1/agora-a-local-centric-distributed-compartmental-corporate-infrastructure

I have been envisioning elements of a system like described in the post above, since 2013. Steem's design filled in some big gaps in my concept which is partly why I have undying enthusiasm for it, though at times I feel like I am talking to a brick wall trying to explain what it is, and what it isn't, and where it's going.

But this is to be expected. I suppose the recent tumble in price has been several more big whales powering down and cashing out their liquid assets. Increasingly, this loss of 'investors' will just be the loss of the mischief making whales I mentioned above.

The foregoing link, obviously, focuses on the application to operating a business in a hostile environment. But to round it out, including all of the references to my writing on the subject, here is one from @dantheman that inspired the second post about Steem being a prototype for a decentralised government:

https://steemit.com/government/@dantheman/what-does-a-truly-decentralized-government-look-like

Another post from me discussing another facet, which I address sparingly in the Agora post, about catastrophe and blockchain insurance systems:

https://steemit.com/disaster/@l0k1/resilience-the-core-virtue-of-decentralisation-blockchain-based-insurance-against-the-loss-of-power-and-communications-services

This covers an element of the system that will eventually form, with Steem as the seed crystal in the centre of it. At base, Governments are ostensibly an insurance system. They fail to deliver on their promise because they quickly form into opaque, centralised hierarchies that are disconnected from reality, and become harbours for psychopaths who enjoy being surrounded by yes-men and having the power of life and death (or just freezing people out of society).

Only those who understand where this is all going, are going to keep at it

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But that's going to be enough to get it through into the next phase.

The solid phase.

In fact, the brutal difficulty of making it as a creator of content on Steem has been intentional, and though they have tried to polish the pointy edges that give power to exploiters, trolls and scammers, it is meant to be difficult, because they are trying to find people like me, and others I have been also finding, who will form a solid, hard core that will take this project into the future.

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We can't stop here! This is Whale country!

Loki was born in Australia, now lives in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist. Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration.

I'm a thoughtocaster, a conundrummer in a band called Life Puzzler. I've flipped more lids than a monkey in a soup kitchen, of the mind. - Xavier, Renegade Angel

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All images in the above post are either original from me, or taken from Google Image Search, filtered for the right of reuse and modification, and either hotlinked directly, or altered by me