The Big PowerDown Poker

As I have written recently, I feel a great opportunity coming from the recent upheaval on Steem and all the resulting choices for every single user.

When it became clear that we were in fact dealing with a takeover against the will of the community we had to make a call what to do next. Many opted to power down their SP or had long begun to do so with a headstart. Then after the actual powerdown time was reduced last week to 4 weeks total it became likely that much of the current Steem being held would be dumped over the course of the next month.

But, as some had predicted, exchanges like Binance disabled their Steem gateways which leaves the immediate future of Steem in a weird state of limbo.

On the one hand we have major stake ready to be dumped but not having good avenues to do so. On the other hand we have a "surprisingly" good price of Steem still, maybe due to the fact that dumping it now even more than week after the powerdown-time reduction is harder than expected for most.

It's difficult to foresee when exchanges will open up their gateways again and how long the advance-notice will be public before that occurs. The way I see it a massive downward move for Steem will be intimately tied to the point in time those gates are opened again.

Sure, there is still Rudex.Steem on the Bitshares network that already saw a huge decrease in Steem price and the recent price increase of BTS isn't helping that in any way). The only other major way I know of to get rid of your Steem right now is ionomy.

Since I am not a Bittrex customer I am wondering whether they, along with Poloniex and Huobi have also disabled their gateway services for Steem to suppress not only the eventual price drop, but also to avoid becoming liable for not being able to pay out their users' steem on withdrawal requests.

I would reckon in 3 weeks at the latest any potential short-term climb of Steem is over and we are falling into a deep pit. It will be a race to the bottom while people step over each other just to get rid of their Steem before everyone else.

If you are of the mindset that Steem is dead and that we ought to dump it all while we still can, these next weeks might be the last (bad but still) decent chance to do so.

If however you see it more like me and you can envision that the gang have great plans for Steem in the long run you might as well sit back and enjoy the show, potentially playing dangerous price swings before the eventual reopening of the gateway services before it all falls apart for the foreseeable future. If the gang have plans for Steem there might come a day when - despite all the correct reasons for powering all our SP down and dumping it in light of the takeover - Steem will become target of a massive marketing campaign, making its price spike more than we could ever imagine these days.

To be fair, there is also the real possibility that Steem will become part of the Tron chain, in which event it's hard to see how the gang will prop up Steem in the longterm to justify holding on to our SP now.

Maybe the swapping factor becomes important here: 10 TRX for every Steem might still make for a good hold longterm if then Tron becomes the gang's darling in marketing blockchain to the unaware people out there stumbling over the cryptocurrency space for the first time.

In any event, the complete delisting of Steem from exchanges seems to be off the table as they are siding with the new Steem(it) management citing the "code is law" mantra, where the quality and authorization of witnesses doesn't seem to matter half as much as that there are still user accounts who are simply called "witnesses". Binance announced it would reduce the available Steem pair down to only one but what that is also saying is that despite this recent attack on the chain they are supporting this new future of Steem and may have their own stake in it as well (pun intended).

If you are unsure what to do with your Steem, you may want to decide that now in these days, not later. Get rid of it somehow, or lock it in and hope for the audaciousness of the gang who may still have great plans for Steem long after all the early adopters have left, sold their SP for pennies on the dollar and moved to Hive. Which would come much much later, making your stake unusable for the midterm future.

Consider these circumstances carefully when bailing on Steem. You may do all your work and focus on Hive but selling out of Steem for next to nothing along with everyone else might not be the best idea if you can afford to just forget about your SP stake and hope for a massive resurgence in Steem's price down the road someday.

Hive will be the heart-project for those who once believed in Steem's original mission, no doubt about it. It's everything we ever wanted Steem to be. But that doesn't mean that Hive will become as financially huge as Steem might - simply because the gang has no stake in it, but every stake in Steem. Literally.

Play your cards well while you still hold them.

I am not a financial advisor and this is not financial advice

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