Thanks @stellabelle, and welcome to the club of no self-upvoting! Just as a point of reference, it was YOUR post about Steemit as a "gift economy" that originally inspired me to stop that practice. I believe in the whole pay it forward thing... but that also means I have to put my faith in the system and walk my talk.

It's hard to believe Steem went under $1.00... seems like basically buying it "on sale" at the moment. I guess others had the same idea... just checked Bittrex (at 3:00pm US Pacific) and there's a bit of a mini-rally going now, and it's not just following BTC off its morning lows.

I keep coming back to this single thought: There's no "they" who will come blazing in and fix any issues we have on Steemit. We're decentralized... so that makes US the "they" responsible for creating the future. And I think that's were many of our problems can be traced to... people more concerned about "their next 5 cents" than whether or not we will still HAVE a Steemit in 2020, or 2025. My actions are VERY SELFISHLY oriented towards the latter!