I bought my first Bitcoin in 2011, lost them in the Mt.Gox events (I still have the correspondence from Japan about the bankruptcy), bought Litecoin, traded IOTA, ran a couple miners on CPU and GPUs - and I think the markets are full of hot air and crazy people.
Hear me out. When I bought my first Bitcoin, there were no exchanges. No markets. You had to create your wallet, send money to a random guy on the internet and then you received coins. The community was small and full of programmers, nerds and libertarians. I was interested in the technology, because I thought (and still think) that the blockchain really is a fascinating piece of technology and that - once created - it will stay forever. There is a certain value to this functionality that nobody can stop this distributed way of agreeing on transactions and facts. But the current money-making frenzy has nothing to do with the original idea. You can not really use Bitcoins (or Litecoins or any other of the major coins) for anything useful. You can not buy pizza, or games, or pay your electricity bill. That's completely out of focus for the moment, at least for Bitcoin. Ethereum, IOTA and a few others might get back to it, but for now the wall street gang has taken over.
Steem is a little bit different, because of the attached community, the platforms and projects that are build on content. That's why I'm writing this short article here, why I started using dlive, logged into utopian. But I am waiting for the day when cryptotokens are actually useful again.
What are your thoughts? Do you still trade? Are you invested into Steem only?