You guys might be questioning where I'm coming from on this and it is understandable. Ultimately @jerrybanfield was an interesting piece of STEEM history making several videos back in June which captured everyone's attention that he didn't already have.
@jerrybanfield was able to bull rush his way in and go relatively deep putting in about $100,000 into the platform and then run a successful enough campaign to actually get himself into the top 20 witnesses when it was mainly filled up with basement dwelling ghost figures who have mainly been here since the beginning. That was pretty impressive and he was pumping traffic like crazy. A lot of people will say his message was wrong about what STEEM was and he was kind of scammy the thing was he was super visible and didn't give a fuck what the ghost whales or anyone else thought. He actually became more visible and well known than @ned or anyone else on the platform.
He just did what he was going to do.
STEEM actually has tons of problems. Almost too many to list so just having someone who can push traffic and make moves isn't going to solve the situation.
What Would It Take For Someone To Replicate What He Did?
For starters I feel like we can't be in a bear market where most retail investors are getting crushed. They simply are feeling so much pain and the rewards for STEEM don't seem enticing to most people.
Ask yourself if you are willing to power up $10,000 worth to maybe have a vote worth $1.50??? When you do the math it never makes sense because there are way bigger players dictating the majority of the reward pool.
Secondly if the price keeps falling I feel that a person would have to put in $100,000 to really make a significant move at this point and dictate enough of the reward pool and get into a position for someone to run a campaign big enough to get into a top 20 witness position. As time goes on the Witnesses which don't have vote decay applied to them are able to hang out and stack an insane amount of coins sometimes without really doing much of anything on the STEEM blockchain. One witness expressed that he feels Witnesses shouldn't be obligated to do anything more than "Witness Blocks." I rolled my eyes..... I mean thanks a fucking lot for watching the coins stack up in your wallet as if there aren't thousands of other people who couldn't pull off this miraculous task if they were one of the chosen ones.
A lot of the delegated proof of stake chains end up having the same witnesses for the most part. It almost becomes a thing where I'm not sure that it makes sense to invest in any STEEM Clone unless you feel that you can become a Witness and reap those kinds of rewards because they are siphoning off so much. Check out the Peerplays Witness list. Recognize any familiar names?
https://peerplaysdb.com/witnesses
Hmmm.....those are so experienced in witnessing blocks and coins piling up into their wallet on most of these chains. It is pretty insane to be honest.
Why Don't I Make The Move?
On the STEEM blockchain it is too expensive to do so at this point unfortunately and as we have seen since STEEM doesn't have an additional revenue sources like advertisements it drops as bad or worse than shit tokens losing 95% of its value from the highs. Despite having one of the only useful examples of a real world application of a blockchain it gets price destroyed as bad or worse than anything out there.
It is far too risky to really put a large bet on STEEM. I'm getting my average down and may or may not commit more to it if the price drops further. I'm actually watching the SBD price and might try a risky move of buying a decent amount of SBD on Bittrex and then taking it over to my STEEM wallet and doing the hidden conversion to STEEM since SBD is worth $1 of STEEM in conversion but it is an average of the STEEM price for 3.5 days I believe. It is risky because you are just in the dark for a few days not knowing how much you will end up with and what the price will be when you end up with it. At that point I would have the STEEM and then could keep doing that same method of get more and more STEEM and either power that up or just take the profits to other projects.
Could You Make A Big Move On Another Chain?
I have looked at this a lot and it is hard to say if it is worth it oftentimes because there is so much uncertainty with the other chains. Oftentimes they don't have many exchanges or very much liquidity on those exchanges. WEKU still has just one centralized Witness node so we aren't sure what is going to happen with that. WhaleShares I'm just letting stack up but I didn't try to run a witness node on there. It is a BitShares asset and doesn't show up on CoinMarketCap or anything so it is hard to tell how much exposure it will get outside of people on Steemit going over there. I like some aspects of that platform though. Smoke.io again has very little liquidity and is only traded on BitShares. It's market cap is pretty far down and is around 800 on CoinMarketCap. It is unclear if a person would ever be able to get their money out. Touch.Tube which was the Vice Media Token is in a similar situation. They haven't done the conversion on the exchanges so it is mainly the witnesses getting the rewards and then a few select people and the witnesses uploading porn they downloaded. In my mind I thought it was going to be independent cam girls and stuff uploading porn but it has mainly been reuploads from other tube sites. Again it would be tough to get your money out of that situation for the time being. Peerplays looks interesting but I don't want to be involved in anything dealing with gambling. I'm not morally opposed to it but I don't know what state gaming commissions or anything like that would saying about a lot of platforms like that. Scorum is actually the platform that is a STEEM clone that impresses me the most but again it is super thinly traded and I even messaged the development team to ask them what the inflation on that chain is and didn't get an answer. If I was going to make a big move it would be on Scorum but it is risky. I have done the math and it seems like if I invested $5,000 I could actually be in a decent situation with my Scorum Power over there and with my athletic and computer background maybe the people running witness nodes over there would allow me to end up in a top 20 position. I blog about sports related stuff but it would require me to focus in on consistently posting about that type of stuff. By investing in these blogging platforms it is almost like you are signing yourself up for a job unless you end up in a top 20 witness position and maybe do some automated curation or run bid bots or other things like that. It is always a tough decision with it because a person could just buy thing like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero, EOS ....etc at low prices and then focus on other things and come back and sell when things are going crazy again which could be years from now. Let's hope not.
The biggest fear is that we invest in these blogging platforms and our time ends up being worth next to nothing.
Conclusion
It is unlikely someone has deep enough pockets to really make a move on STEEM at this point. As we see it keeps dropping down the list on CoinMarketCap. When I initially joined it was #3 on CoinMarketCap. There are about 50 people draining STEEM and it is easy to get caught on the wrong side of it. The most negative view of what STEEM is would be a carrot to get us to chase by buying more power so we can pay ourselves to talk to ourselves. The most positive view of what STEEM is would be that it is the biggest online crypto communities and one of the only real world examples of a usable decentralized social platform.
Why I reinvested in STEEM? I invested in the community. Not @ned , not Steemit Inc, not Steemit.com, not the long awaited SMTs, not the majority of the witnesses. I could easily get caught on the wrong side of things but I feel it will have one more run at least because the social platforms build on EOS haven't arrived yet so STEEM and the STEEM clones are where we are at right now.
These are just my random rambling thoughts for now mother fuckers. Smash that upvote button if you like Drinksgiving!
