And I like it so far.

This time it really surprised me.

All for one, one for all

Because I was busy with the framework of that thing we call 'a house', I did not pay that much attention to the Steem hard fork number 19. Last tuesday was I was all booked up. Even my daily walks have be cast aside for the last 3 weeks, most of the time. Had to let some social events pass me by. Sometimes that is the way things go. And we got the two little rascal kittens, called Louis and Levi, in our home. Louis got a bit sick, but is already back on his paws again. The days fly by. It is a challenge to keep stay posting on Steem at the moment. Or to keep up with others posting. There must be a balance to be found somewhere. Luckily no high ladder things for the time being. Still no time to go plan trips. The full booked agenda even moved forward to the third week of july. Summer holidays closing in.

And then there was hard fork 19 {HF19} for Steem. The big equalizer, where 1 Steem Power would count the same as 1 Vote. Exponential went to linear, that was the biggest change, it stated, so my guess was that my upvotes would weight in like 4 times more. Too busy to let it all really sink in. Some Steem members were afraid that it would have a bad effect, especially for the accounts that held low amounts of Steem Power {SP}. And that voting at a 100% was have a harder hit on the Voting battery, four times harder per 100% vote. And up to 1 million VESTS, that is about 500 SP {Steem Power}, the slider to set the percentage would be invisible. At current cryptocurrency/ bitmoney market rate this Steem Power worth a value of 1085 US$. And some Steem members will remember the time when this only would have cost 35 US$ to buy that kind of Steem worth...

How did that work out?

As far as I can see, this should have worked out in many ways for the good. The exponential factor was nice for the highest level accounts, so it was a great guesture of these accounts that it was agreed upon to make it so. And I am convinced that this will give the market price of Steem a boost. Because for a huge part it has become so much more fun to participate here at this social media platform. Thanks to the linear voting system every Steem Power held makes good for one vote. This is a big game changer. For me this was a huge surprise to see what the effect was, instantly! My full 100% vote at least added 7 $ in potential payout, where I had been expecting 1 at the most... It seemed that 1 Steem Power was able to add 0.001 to the potential payout. This is a game changer, this is the big equalizer and I think the Steem community can be quite happy about it.

Getting higher payouts, on average, also means gaining more Steem Power faster. Especially if one sets the Rewards setting to Power Up 100%. It will be much more 'easy' to reach that 500 Steem Power (about 1M VESTS) and see the voting power percentage slider appear. The wealth will spread faster amongst the ever growing Steem userbase. And it will attract more attention. Where at one point the addition of the Steem Community Token {SCT} will even rock things more. That is the one I can hardly wait for to be implemented. And in the meantime we can all enjoy the positive effects of the linear voting system.

So, my speculation for the price of Steem still stands: 12 US$ somewhere around autumn. But I'd settle for half too... ;-)