As much as I complain about my stupidity in powering down and cashing everything out in the early days, I don't actually regret it. I made a decent chunk of change and paid some bills (including paying off my wife's truck at the time), but it could have been SO much more if I had been patient. I like to believe I was fearful when everyone else was greedy. Steem had been getting flooded with all kinds of cheap, lazy content and it had started distracting from the actual quality posts. It seems like we're in a much better place as far as content quality is concerned, it's just a matter of upping quantity at this point. I've considered keeping some Hive liquid, but as you said, it can be difficult to balance between having Hive available vs retaining HP vs HBD in Savings, etc. If nothing else, at least the power down period is a LOT shorter than it used to be, so actually taking profit should be a bit easier.
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It always could have been more, but being about to pay off the truck was pretty cool! Any profit is better than none (or a hypothetical one).
Yes, the shorter power-down period now is much nicer! What was it back then—6 months?
I don't remember for certain, but 6 months sounds right. I get that the idea was to not let value bleed out too quickly, but I missed out on quite a bit of value as the price declined during the power-down.
Given the insane amounts some of those posts were making first year, I can kind of understand making powering down more difficult.