It just so happens that my powerdown day also falls on the day my paycheck becomes a pending deposit in my bank account.

It's like having a double payday. Score.

In addition (double score)

Bitcoin has just flagged twice in the last 30 hours and broken through the $7k resistance level. Unfortunately it's already fallen below that and sits at $69XX... no wait... $68XX now... no wait...

Volatility is high.

Unfortunately this has a lot to do with crude oil and the stock market being up. Pretty frustrating to see Bitcoin so correlated to traditional assets during a time like this. However, as I've stated before on multiple occasions, Bitcoin only has to break its correlation to the legacy economy for a few weeks a year to skyrocket into the unicorn asset that we know it to be. Those few weeks may be coming sooner rather than later.

Block reward halving.

The Bitcoin block reward is going to be cut in half in 5888 blocks from now. Let's call it 41 days. This is a long-term bullish event and a short-term bearish event. The halving has miners shaking in their boots. Bitcoin is already unprofitable to mine (or it least it was before the last difficulty change). Cutting that income in half is going to be absolutely devastating to miners at this point, assuming we continue trading under $8k.

However...

Bitcoin never received a halving hype cycle. Did this speculative pump/dump get destroyed by the economic crisis, or simply delayed? If the economy opens back up around the time of the halving who knows what kind of crazy speculative volatility could arise from these series of events. This is especially relevant because Bitcoin has a pretty strong history of performing well during the months of May and June.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin also has a significant chance crashing drastically during this time. If the stock market just happens to perform badly during the halving then Bitcoin would dump even further. A dump right after the halving would cause yet more miners to shut down operations because of the sheer unprofitably of it all. We'd likely have to wait several weeks or even months for the mining difficultly to be adjusted accordingly.

Speculation over.

None of this matters to me. I'm going to keep accumulating regardless of price action. I still believe the fair market value of Bitcoin is around $8k at the moment, and anything less than that is quite a deal considering it hasn't traded under the doubling line for over 7 years. By the end of the year I expect Bitcoin to be at least $12.8k, nuff said.

CMC said Steem was trading at 16.5 cents today when I was looking to dump it. You can imagine my annoyance when I logged in and saw it trading at 14.5 cents. There's an obvious deposit/withdrawal issue on Huobi and HitBTC that is preventing arbitrage equilibrium. I was considering holding my Steem until they resolved the issue, hoping it would bump up the price, but then I realized I'd rather just have the Bitcoin immediately. My exit from Steem is more political than economical.

8:30

Hive is getting yet more free press for being above Steem on the market cap.
We can be sure we will get even more free press when it shows up in the top 100 on CMC.

A lot of people, including myself, have really dismissed our dominance as not that impressive. For me, and other like-minded individuals, of course Hive would be trading higher than Steem. Hive is a better version of Steem so of course that would be the case.

However, this has never happened before in the cryptosphere. When has a fork of a coin ever been worth more than the original? The uniqueness of this situation just keeps getting better and better in terms of getting the good word out there, especially considering Justin Sun is doing everything in his power to prevent users from learning about what has happened and how things are progressing.

The bigger the difference in market cap, the worse it makes poor ol' Justin look. For a while it looked like he was defending the 17.5 cent support pretty zealously, but now who knows where the floor will land. For a while the price of Steem was holding steady even while the entire market crashed, and more recently the price of Steem declined while the entire market was going up. There are some very weird things going on with Steem demand right now.

In the long run, there is no way he can keep up with us. We have all the experienced devs and we have a gigantic decentralized @steem.dao fund (thanks again, Steemit Inc). His success/failure doesn't much matter to me either way. I wish him the best as I opt-out of the system he's created.

I've got my Hive.

I'm good.

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