One of my former tenants used to pay me in Bitcoin. I liked it--made me feel all anarchistic. Plus, those coins (this was two years back) have turned out to be what you might call a serious overpayment--BTC was trading in the $600 range at the time.

I cashed out most of them when I got them, because frankly I needed the money, but I kept about half a Bitcoin in my Coinbase wallet kind of by accident. When BTC challenged the $3k mark a month and a half ago, I remembered. That was a pretty good day. Not every day you find a $1400 bill in your pocket.

This time, though, I was involved in this niche project called Steemit. I was blogging here once in a while, putting in my time, doing some curation work, writing, that kind of thing. Not on a daily basis, but once in a while. Then I thought, "hey, I have this money nobody knows about and my wife can't give me that look for blowing. Why don't I move some over to Steem?"

So I did. Just like a tenth of a Bitcoin. But I picked up 200SP for it, and that was delicious. I settled down to put some hard farming in to get up to the magic 500SP level and get my slider. I blogged in a disciplined, mature fashion, with original content, promoting a lot of other Steemians ([Best of Steemit](https://steemit.com/steemit/@cristof/best-of-steemit-tuesday-an-appeal-for-help-from-portugal-plus-a-double-winner) has now promoted well over a hundred other accounts, by my reckoning), following good people, commenting, you know, all the hard work you gotta do to be prosperous.

<div class="pull-left"><img src="https://i.memecaptain.com/gend_images/_0HFZw.jpg" height="45%" width="45%" alt="Best of the Best Logo"></div>Steem responded by losing 69% of its value in a month. My lovely voting power went from .20 down to .10. The reward pool shrank like a puddle in summer, such that where my goal used to be to have five posts in a row over $5, now I'm trying to have at least every other post make a buck. Gathering Steem? Ha. I had a plan for when I'd get to the magical 500, and every day that date pushed back. <br><br>

So much work. SO MUCH WORK. Hundreds of hours, taken from other projects that actually seemed to love me, only to watch my SP needle tick up .005 for curating a post that made eleven cents. It's all too much.

So today I gave up. I went over to Coinbase, cashed out another .1 BTC and powered it up. Presto! 638SP, suckas!

Look, I'm all in here. *All. In.* This is not a blog site, someplace I post now and then. This is **home**. I'm going to be here for a long time, and I want my eggs in this basket, with @johnjgeddes and @redhen and @aggroed and @rhondak and @gmuxx and @smuggly-sparrow and @jayjayjeffrey and @jrhughes hundreds on hundreds of others (I follow a lot of people). The price of Steem is only a buying opportunity, not a value judgment. I love the work I do here, and especially the work all of *you* do. So it's time to buy, and weld the outer door shut on the airplane. We're not bailing. Not ever.

Now, if you'll pardon me, imma go use my power slider. A LOT.

~Cristof

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