Hi Hive account@ryangtanaka, I am very happy for you that you were able to stand up again through the cryptocurrency investments.

Although the info you included in your post are very important, I must admit, they are hard to digest in one read. Especially for someone new to the cryptocurrency world like me.

I noticed this part of what you said:

The beauty of blockchain technology is that a well-balanced system doesn't necessarily need to massively scale for it to be useful. If an ecosystem fulfills the purpose of the people who use it, that's all it really needs. Balance, symmetry, fairness and sustenance -- cryptocurrencies represent the values that ought to be the mantras of societies that considers itself progressive and civilized, while providing the tools necessary for local and grassroots communities to thrive on its own.

Although these may have been the original values that the blockchain world was built on, I believe that the cryptocurrency world is losing these values at a rapid speed.
I say that considering the issues that we are facing in steemit, from monopolizing power and votes, to voting abuse by big dudes, to starvation by minnows, to mafia locality rules between whales...etc

I am not trying to paint the picture with black, but certainly we have black spots in the big picture that need to be cleaned or dealt with.
I believe that, wherever there are people, there will be some abuse in any system, no matter how decentralized we want to think it is.

This point is important to understand for the new-to-the-game-people, who are used to unfair governments and are promised with a Utopia in the form of cryptocurrency and blockchain worlds. Otherwise, their shock may be very hard on them, especially with the little knowledge they have about this world.

Many thanks for sharing your point of view and your story. If I may suggest, and I hope you dont take it hard, it would be great if you could make series of shorter posts in the future about the subject you would like to talk about, especially when it is related to cryptocurrency. It will help everyone to focus and understand more about it, as well as appreciate your explanations of it.

Best of luck to all of us in this new world :)