Today was a monumental day, one that brings a very interesting chapter of my life to a close. I transferred the last of my large power-downs out of the Steemit wallet to an exchange, waited the customary three seconds for the transaction to happen (the speed of which still impresses me), then hit “sell”.
Staring at the new estimated account value of exactly $18.41 in my Steemit wallet made me reminisce about my years on Steemit, the joys and frustrations and all the ways in which it changed me. Cashing out that last large powerdown felt like a graduation of sorts. This kind of closure can be a wonderfully satisfying thing and it can also leave you feeling a little melancholy as well.
We all had so many hopes and dreams for Steemit. We thought it would disrupt mainstream social media and change the world. We were naive in ways we didn’t yet understand. Despite missing that larger goal it still had a huge impact on many of us.
A Second Chance
Thankfully, due to a group of very intelligent and well-intentioned people, we’ve been given a second chance. Hive. A platform to share our content, connect, and thrive. I’m very grateful for it and am looking forward to being an active participant in the evolution of Hive in the years to come.
We can all do our parts to ensure Hive is a success. Recruitment drives, quality content creation, contests, merchandise, media exposure...the only limit is our imaginations.
To mark the occasion I’m considering having my Steemit ring melted down and a Hive one made from the silver.
As the years go by we begin to realize that good-byes are an integral part of life. This is the final day of my 48th trip around the sun. It's truly the end of an era for but I've never been more excited about what's on the horizon. I'm equally as excited to share it with all of you over this next year.
I hope you're all having a great week!
With gratitude,
Eric Vance Walton
*I am an American novelist, poet, traveler, and crypto-enthusiast. If you’ve enjoyed my work please sign up for my author newsletter at my website. Newsletter subscribers will receive exclusive updates and special offers and your information will never be sold or shared.
Alarm Clock Dawn, one of the first full length novels published on the blockchain, and the book that started it all for me can be found HERE. Or Click Here to read it for free on the Steemit blockchain
My book on meditation, The Perfect Pause, is priced at $12.99 (paperback) and $4.99 (eBook). Buy the paperback and receive the eBook for free!
I have a lot to thank to Steem - and have such warm memories of SteemFest, the people, the Steem meet-ups I've organized in my city. But it's time to move on and Hive has never felt unfamiliar to me :-) Steem does when I go back to that place now. Weird how quickly that could change.
Congratz on the final Power Down :-)
I do too! What SteemFest(s) did you attend? The entire vibe of the platform is different now, it doesn't even feel like the same place. There are still a few people who are cross-posting on there but I see very few who are using the platform exclusively.
Thank you! It was a good feeling to finally get it out of there. I hope you and yours are well, @soyrosa!
I attended SteemFest3! I loved it and obsessively wanted to go to SteemFest4 but couldn't for multiple reasons. Now it's waiting for HiveFest or maybe SwarmFest :-) Maybe it's not a bad idea to do that one in Amsterdam again, Roeland's home town and a 30 minute train ride for me :D
Lots has changed, yes, but so many people I met on SteemFest moved to Hive. As I've always seen the people who are willing to 'show their real face' on meet-ups/fests as the core community it wasn't hard to get used to this place.
I'm well, and 'mine' ar well too. Hope the same for you Eric. Also: Happy Birthday :-) I almost missed that. Cheers!
Ahh, Krakow! I attended 1 & 2 but missed 3 & 4. I haven't heard of any plans for a [insert name here}Fest yet but, I imagine due to travel restrictions. Hopefully, we'll see one organized for 2021.
Thank you for the birthday wishes! It was a great day. I really want to make this 49th trip around the sun count. : ). Take care, @soyrosa!
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 5/10)
It fills me with a lot of nostalgia to read this post! (At Steemit I started reading you and others who have already left. The feeling I feel with steemit is the same as I feel with my country, Venezuela: seeing friends leave and only a few of us stay inside. I think the ring is a beautiful gesture, very romantic, if you will. This is a monumental step, especially when it's the eve of your birthday: you start with renewed energy and leave behind all that weighs you down. Let's drink to this new stage. Tomorrow, the 18th, I really congratulate you. A big hug, Eric!
Perhaps if you start posting in Korean or Chinese you will see how active it is on STEEM.
Thanks Nancy. I'll never forget how exciting those first few years of Steemit were. As a writer, I felt like all of the work I'd done over the previous twenty years finally found its audience. I'm not getting nearly the same engagement now as I was then but I'm very grateful that I had a chance to experience what that felt like. Cheers to new beginnings! Today marks the last year of my 40's, there are wonderful things on the horizon. Take care and enjoy the rest of your week!
Happy birthday, dear friend! A year of new opportunities begins for you today. It's decreed! A hug from Venezuela. ;)
Thank you! 😊
For me, this is a sad day when I realized that it was all over. In psychology, there is such a principle: the more expectations from the event, the higher the likelihood of crushing disappointment. You wait more - you get less, you wait less - you get more. The principle of reinforced concrete, without exception.
It was a sad day for me too. In reality the platform had been in decline for long time due to lack of effective leadership. So far things seem different here on Hive.
It's been an iconic day myself because today I finally withdrew all of my last steem as well and my account is currently worth about 31$ at the moment I'm thinking a lot of people will sell and I just sold to also buy hive and power up. It's finally Over and I'm glad I'm rid of steem. However changing my hive password to something new is what I don't know how to do.
Congrats! I'm sure a lot of people are cashing in their last power downs in these next few weeks. I know I've seen a few posts from people on how to change the password, if I run across any info I'll share it with you.
Thanks a whole lot Eric and cheers, now the emotional ties with steem is finally cut off. Now unto better things with hive ahead.
Yes, here's to better days!
Can't wait to see where the true value of HIVE then lands. My prediction is dust. That's one category lower than shit coin yet time will tell.
The future of steem is over o..
One might argue that DPoS governance has proved a failure and is broken beyond repair.
I don't get... could you expantiate
There is no doubt that papers, if not books, will be written about the STEEM experiment (@dan always called it that by the way and he has since moved on to EOS). But to sum up the main reasons for the failure in trust and governance one need only look at the drama surrounding the HIVE fork. All trust was lost and the possible corruption of DPoS governance was exposed with the V.22.2 Cabal's freezing of targeted Steemit Inc. accounts. Mr. Sun raised that horror by organising the fraud done by two exchanges to undo the wrong done by HF22.2. No real investor with with a half ounce of intelligence would ever trust such governance with the security of their investment after throwing a pie in the face of a $10 million investor.
My experience in DPoS was never about investment so let's put that aside. One thing that really interested me was the immutability that the chain offered. That, too, was thrown out the window in the fork. There has never been a precedence to my knowledge of such a fork as HIVE. The industry standard has always been that the forked chain mirrors exactly the historical record of the original chain up until the moment that the fork happens. They then both go their separate way. Even ETH, which forked with the intention to undo a transaction, rolled back time to before the smart contract was created and then continued on it's own way. All transactions before that time were unchanged on both chains.
With hive we had the Orwellian use of the term airdrop to explain how some historical wallet values seemed to disappear or were transferred to other wallets/places on the chain. If you would like to know the difference between a fork and an airdrop by industry standards you may find the following link informative.
https://www.investopedia.com/tech/cryptocurrency-forks-vs-airdrops-whats-difference/
Immutability was grossly misused in the HIVE fork and has since been done on the STEEM chain by Mr. Sun with the theft of funds from wallets of the V.22.2 Cabal and their allies in the coup.
Although this is the briefest of an explanation on the subject, it will hopefully give you some insight into the meaning of my remark.
Thank you for taking your time to explain this concept
That is a pretty sweet ring! I never would have thought of having something like that made. Very cool! I have powered down a lot of my Steem. I am leaving a bit in my account still so I can do some curation. Then with the proceeds from that I will probably stack more Hive or WAX. I have a pretty strong feeling about both of those chains. My goal with Steem now is just to milk it for every penny I can and actually invest in something worthwhile!
Thanks @bozz! I wanted something to commemorate the publishing of my novel on there. That was the apex of my time on Steemit. Leaving a little there and collecting curation rewards would have been the smart thing to do but I just needed a clean break. It pained me to even log in after everything that happened.
Trust me, I hear you about just wanting to wash your hands of the place. I am not a fan of everything that went down either which is why I have zero qualms about squeezing every cent out of them that I can...
Kudos to you for doing that @bozz! It was the users who were wronged the most on that platform. Many in the third world had started to rely on it for an income source and then it was snatched from underneath them.
Yes, I know. It has been pretty horrible across the board.
Same here, last one about a hour ago. Trying to dump it right now!
I hope you got a good price for it! It was up a little when I was selling.
My advice would be to wait until the sell off is finished. During the power down my approach has been to put sell orders in for 2500 satoshi and it seemed to spike to othat on poloniex at least weekly, though it has not for over a week now. My guess is that JS will pump it once there are no HIVE users which will benefit from the pump. My trades have been on poloniex for STEEM and, with my equal scum bag opportunity policy, my HIVE to XMR trades have been done with @blocktrades.
This is so touching.. i believe in hive so much and i am willing to give it my time and energy. You have a nice ring there too. In your opinion, what do you think is the secret to succeeding in hive?
Thanks, @bhoa! The secret to success here is creating quality content and engaging with others on the platform. A little self-branding/marketing also helps. Think of yourself (and your writing) as a brand and develop that brand accordingly. If you do that you won't have to search for followers, they will find you.
Thank you for this wisdom
It's amazing how hive took steemit place in people's heart, people's plan towards hive have been diverted to hive and it's not a bad thing since it come useful than steemit. Let's hive on!
Thanks for the comment @opeyemioguns but I see you've made three similar comments on this same post (below). Could you please delete those other two when you have a chance?
this was not my fault but the network issue, I was trying to make one comment but it made it 3 times. I am sorry if that look like spam, I would delete two now!
No worries at all! The site was glitching a lot that day. Thanks for removing the extras!
Yeah, all 10,000+ of them.
@ericvancewalton, Steem is Emotion. Good wishes from my side towards your Future Journey. Stay blessed always.
Thank you! Stay blessed my friend.
Welcome and thank you so much.
Like you that same melancholy has hit me hard, yet unlike you HIVE is just more of STEEM with the Ninja Mined Tokens now hidden in the SPS slush fund (or whatever HIVE calls it) of the V.22.2 Cabal; to distribute where they see fit with it safely ensconced behind @gtg's Return Proposal (#0).
Another emotion is sadness for 10k+ users who have followed the vindictive and greedy Pied Pipers of the V.22.2 Cabal; selling off their STEEM to buy the HIVE produced by the Cabal's token grinding.
And of course let us not forget the chumps of the Cabal, those non-consensus witnesses who pay to secure the network out of their own pocket while the Cabal sprinkles reward crumbs to the naive users below them in this reward pyramid.
Not even the illusion of change was required. Not even something so simple as witness vote retention was needed in the community splitting hard fork for those users to follow the Cabal's deceptive narrative of decentralisation. Even with STINC's ninja stake now hidden in the SPS slush fund, how did that decentralisation go anyway?