I remember the great days of trading BTC and being able to talk mess to the noobs in the trollbox on poloniex, back then, there was approximately 9k users at max on any given day. Crypto back then was truly in a small place, until the Winklevoss twins attempted to get bitcoin recognized by SEC.
I remember all the FUD surrounding btc, it was plundering from ~ 1500 USD to 900 USD. Talk about the sea of red, many newbies haven't seen the blood bath that occurred the day before the big SEC decision. I mean everything was down, I can almost say that every alt-coin that day might have completely bottomed out to its new low. Just Imagine getting XRP @ 0.02USD, ETH @ 30 USD, or LTC @ 3 USD that would've been a great time to buy if you ask me and looking at how things turned out.
Once the SEC decision was made public (BTC got denied of course) the markets instantly lit up green, that was really interesting to witness. It was like you could've bought any alt-coin and came out on top that day. However, following that day would attract significant amounts of new money. The denial of BTC by SEC actually helped to expand crypto in general IMO, it attracted the normal wall street day traders who were used to getting 1-2% movement on stocks to the excitement of BTC's volatility. I would also say that it attracted a significant amount of non-wallstreet players as well.
This monumental attraction to btc and its volatility caused new money to blow up exchanges, mostly poloniex as its one of the only U.S recognized crypto exchanges available so naturally noobs trust it more than others. However, all this new money coming into crypto killed poloniex overtime and while also making poloniex extremely wealthy. After the SEC decision, that's when I started experiencing server problems, difficulty selling cryptos that were mooning, and the almost constant disabling of various wallets.
I've watched the network grow from 9k users to almost 60k users in a matter of months, that's when all the 'funny business' started occurring. I remember when XRP was going bananas getting up toward +80% the whole day, and for some reason the servers started lagging really bad causing many people including myself to not be able to sell for profits...Instead we had to wait nearly hours in order to sell because the website just kept rendering - this drove me crazy. I know that day there were people who lost thousands of dollars..And I always wonder, where did that money go??? It just didn't happen with XRP either, it happened with almost any coin that was mooning.
All that money they make from exchange fees and repeated complaints they still didn't manage to update their servers...That's when I was almost completely done with poloniex. The icing on the cake for me was when they got rid of the trollbox, that was a pretty cool feature to have it made trading more enjoyable. Especially if you had a lot of rep (you'd have a pink username in the box) you knew it was from a 'more legit' user than the others. RIP trollbox!!!
It seems know that Poloniex has completely gone to shit, specifically with their wallet issues. STEEM and SBD are always under maintenance, and poloniex hold a siginificant amount of STEEM around 25 million or so, and if people can't get it off the exchange then inevitably people will have to sell STEEM and buy another cryto which will in turn drive the price STEEM down.
With All of this being said, time buy more STEEEM and POWER up!