Thanks Hive account@hypnopreneur for organizing the meetup and writing it up! By the way, the reason I left a tad bit early is that I couldn't wait to get home and start playing with Steem on a deeper level.

I left the meetup with two main takeaways.

1. From Hive account@knircky's talk, I gained a new appreciation of the architecture and incentive systems of Steem. While still an experiment and likely imperfect, Steem was masterfully designed and innovated greatly in order to make a social network fit into a blockchain framework. For example, I was fascinated by the account recovery mechanism built into the protocol and how one's STEEM Power determines thier bandwidth.

2. From Hive account@yabapmatt talk, I realized that there are easy and hard ways to get STEEM on Steem. The easy way is to use the new platforms that Steemit, Inc has delegated with whalepower to encourage growth. Also it may not be a bad idea to buy upvotes.

   While I'd usually say it's unethical and pathetic to buy attention on social networks (e.g. buying Twitter followers), I think Steem is different. If Steem's economic model incentivizes detrimental behavior, then that's a problem with the economic model. The earlier the problem is brought to light the better.

   And in fact, if I understood correctly, Hive account@yabapmatt thought vote selling on Steem was actually a fantastic feature, since it is a way for advertising revenue to enter the system, but instead of flowing to a centralized entity like Facebook or Google, this revenue is dispersed to anyone willing to delegate power.