Hey Steemians! Many of you have seen me around the platform the last 5 months and even though you don't know me personally I still have managed to make great connections here with others. I wanted to give a bit of an insight of my thoughts lately considering the platform and its future, but also what I will be doing on here.
Lately with the Curation Trail my focus has been on rewarding newcomers, active users but also Steem Famous users already. The point was to spread around the votes as much as possible to legit authors while at the same time giving visibility and a chance at connection with other users to newcomers who have just started out.
Notice that I have been voting on an average around 100 votes per day manually during my curation trail. Here is a screenshot of the activity through steemdb.com
This process in my opinion was one of the hardest ones, not cause it was hard to choose how much to vote on them regarding the trail after my votes, but to be able to tell real ones from fakes. Til now I have been trying to avoid voting on the "fake" ones (most are obvious - some take longer to figure out - and some go through everyone else except being found much later) and even though 
But the community has been very active and good at detecting these "fakes" and the only downside to them was that some may have gotten away with a few steem and steempower, but most get noticed before the payout timer and the only disadvantage is that the curators who thought it was real get their curation rewards diminished when others flag it.
After some major changes though, like the registration through SMS and email only now we are being able to count the new user signups by checking steemd.com and its nice to see that even though it has shrunk in new accounts / day, we can rest assured that many of the new accounts that are created today, have a much higher chance of being "real" users. If you have noticed the "introducemyself" tag (which somehow changed itself from "introduceyourself") its full of new users starting their Steemit Experience.
Even though my Curation Rewards haven't yet been so big that I would settle down quit my job and do this on the daily, they still have started accumulating pretty nicely and I have been seeing 2-3 steem average daily rewards.
When I started on Steemit in May my account had 10 SP, these 5 months I haven't been able to invest any in Steem myself, but my time I have spent here has been rewarded greatly considering the price in the beginning and the amount of Steemdollars authors were receiving. (although I did use some of those SD to buy Steem @ 2$+ now and then, but since it has been inflating I can't say I am at a loss, even during these prices)
The declining price of Steem
Something I was ready for since July when the price went up to 4$ each was that it was going to come down. Of course it was. Steemit is a new project, a new idea and had a handful of early investors. If you had bought 1.000.000 Steem at 30cents each ($300,000) wouldn't you start divesting 40,000 a week of your $4,000,000 balance?
I know I would've and I somehow fail to see all the whining going on lately about it. If you take a glance at currencies and their chart history you can see to many it happens the same. Although it is hard to compare since Steem is different in so many ways, with the vests inflating steem. Its still early adoptors selling to second gen adopters, and that happens everywhere.
Here is a screenshot of my 30 day wallet activity (from steemwhales.com) and how the estimated price dropped under 1k$, so I understand the pain of many that invested at the top or at the middle and of course I understand the frustration of seeing your balance drop on the daily. Like most other investments though, you never place more money than you can afford to lose. Cryptocurrencies have shown in the past that yes, they are risky but with risk comes great rewards if you are patient and don't place emotions on your trades or investments and act on them. So for you who have invested at a high price, I say, wait it out. Stick around, do some curating, see if you can help the community in any way or with your skillset.
I remember my first and only post that made it to over $1000 and the feeling of having contributed and gotten rewarded. Contributions from someone random on the internet getting rewarded by a bunch of other users on the internet, isn't that what its all about? Rewarding content and time used from authors that have contributed here keep doing so. That's why I fell in love with Steemit in the first place, and why I think it will crush the competition and make way for the future of a new market that will make most of similar media sites obsolete.
Anyway, apologize if it became a long read. Just a few of my opinions about everything and nothing. One important thing I've learned over the years with investing in cryptocurrencies is that patience is virtue. Every time I sold too early of something, it bit me later as it went up 10x or 1000x.
On a more personal note.
One of the reasons I haven't introduced myself yet is cause I barely can find any pictures of me. I deleted facebook over 2 years ago (thank god I did) and don't really use any social media sites. I was on the verge of starting my own youtube channel and getting something going there, but the recent youtube changes and reddit changes made me want to not invest more of my time into it, and I was waiting for the next generation of social medias to come out before I tried my hand at "working" on the internet and making content higher in quality and more according to my hobbies.
Now that I think the steem price is finally starting to hit bottom, I have been planning on starting a few major projects of my own now, make them steemit exclusive and focus more of my time and effort into those while providing quality content to Steemit and continuing Curating (which I have been doing on Reddit for free for 5 years)
Stay ready for some of those projects announcements this week! Make sure to throw me a follow if this is the first time you've seen any of my posts. :)
Keep Steeming!
Sources: Upgrade image, Graph Image