"Transisto is self upvoting his own comments like there's no tomorrow!"

C'mon, @haejin - you can't call out anybody for self-upvoting, especially when your own level of self-upvoting is well over 80%. Do not be a hypocrite. I wish people on SteemIt could just let all of this B.S. go. It does not help our platform to attract and keep new users. I would encourage everyone involved to keep their flag battles underneath the radar, as much as possible, for the good of everyone on SteemIt.

As far as self-upvoting goes, your own money is just that - yours. If people choose to invest in Steem Power and use it to benefit themselves, I believe that is normal and acceptable human behavior. As far as I'm concerned, you give away about 15% of your own potential profits - and that could be considered "generous" by most standards. Personally, I try to keep my own interests on SteemIt to about a 50/50 ratio between self-interest and giving it away. And, even then some people on SteemIt are not happy. Whatever - that's their greed/problem. It kind-of blows my mind how people on SteemIt think they have some kind of moral authority to tell other people how they should be spending their own money. The concept of self-control and self-discipline would go a long ways here - if people quit spending so much time trying to control and discipline others.

On to your post:
Since we have passed the point in time where the long-term uptrend and downtrend have crossed, we are currently in "neutral" territory. Until the price action breaks out above the long-term support level, or goes down beneath the long-term resistance line, we are moving sideways.

I think we could move sideways for quite a while here, before we see any major breakouts where anyone should be calling it a bull or a bear market. If we are trading over $8800 at the end of this week - I think that would be a good, bullish sign.

Personally, I am surprised that we did not test lower support at 6K or 5K. We did retest at $6400 - so maybe that was the bottom? IDK. There now seems to be good support underneath current BTC price, and a lot of strong resistance above the current price range. I think we will stay between 6500 and 8500 for a while to come. Price should consolidate in this range before we build up enough energy for a breakout.

Seeing as how a lot of big money and investment banks are now making moves to offer BTC futures products, and Goldman-Sachs opens up their crypto operations in the middle of May, I think these are good signs that overall crypto market cap is going to rise significantly by the end of the year & we will all be much happier - not fighting about how people choose to vote with their Steem Power.