Early Days
I still remember my first days on this blockchain when engagement was super high and the payouts were ridiculous. It all had to do with the price of Steem back then, it was almost close to $10 and it felt like the sky was the limit. I think I had a couple of hundred coins in my wallet and its value was already in the thousands. I didn’t know what I was doing of course since everything was new and had big questionmarks on it. Like what was Steem Power? What’s a power down period? What actually is a blockchain? While we all know what happened after that, it’s fantastic news that we still have a core community and an even much better blockchain all these years later. That’s quite an achievement!
Hive at its best?
The chain is still running all this time later and we have never been in a better spot. That might seem like an odd thing to say when the chain is deemed no more valuable than essentially 8 years ago (sigh) – yes we haven’t had any growth in that aspect – the dapps and community we now have are worth a fortune. It’s just largely not being recognized by the crypto community at large that is still chasing memes. Of course many solid projects have this same problem (and it’s good to see that we are far from alone in this regard), and it’s probably no secret that most are hoping for a big turn around in 2025 when we should have the bull run mania phase. Personally, I am now thinking that such a scenario is only going to be realistic with a Trump win (I am not a Trumper!) since this will entail deregulation as a whole. While regulation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the kind that we have been getting for crypto isn’t helpful. It’s clear that the state is determined to put shackles on crypto since it knows that it is the beginning of the end for the legacy system (there are of course many other developments in that regard).
DeFi
Perhaps the biggest development I am looking forward to on Hive is the DeFi expansion with 
7 years on Hive!
The road to 150k HP also marks almost to the day that I am 7 years on Hive! On a second look I am seeing that I am sharing this achievement with almost a milion other Hivers - lol. Of course that is only on a technical level (and looking at the list it seems there are many duplicates), since probably 99% of those users are now AFH (Away from Hive).
As I suspected the majority of my HP was essentially bought since I "only" received around 42k HP from rewards (it's a bit larger than that since I converted most of the HBD into HP as well).
Conclusion
The road to 150k HP truly has been a long one and while I bought the majority of it over the years, it still feels like a big achievement. I thought about diversifying into other projects after hitting that milestone. Although to be honest, I am actually also feeling underexposed to our ecosystem. Hive is a very unique chain and has massive upside potential in a very real sense since we already have the „killer dapps“ with 
As a general reminder: Please keep in mind that none of this is official investment advice! Crypto trading entails a great deal of risk; never spend money that you can't afford to lose!
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