Hi friends!

A couple of days back, I had expressed my quandary in this post as To Power-up or to Power-down is the Question.

Although I'm still not very convinced of the benefits of powering up STEEM and still looking for one strong reason in favour of it, today I'm doubling up my Steem Power. Why?

Since today is the SPUD (Steem Power Up Day) and I had raised this question surrounding this day, I thought I should at least power up something today irrespective of my confusion around it. So yeah, I'm matching my current SP of 4,028.118 with the same amount of liquid STEEM. So my SP will rise from 4,028.118 to ‭8,056.236‬ after powering up Thus my Steem account will get re-classified from a Minnow to a Dolphin now (...according to the tradition of categorizing wallet size on Steem).

Am I excited to become a dolphin?

Not really!

From the time I joined Steem over 2 years back, I was a Minnow. I was happy and had got accustomed to be classified as a Minnow. Now it will take some time to me for getting accustomed to the Dolphin tag 😊. Changing a status quo does make many of us uncomfortable. Doesn't it?

To this day, I've never boasted of any landmark achievements on Steem or made any announcement post on reaching some specific SP level or gaining any milestone in follower size or my post counts etc. Never did I participate in events like SPUD. I wonder why do we need a day for powering up! But yeah, if there is a contest themed around it, it does make sense. However my account doesn't qualify for participation in these contests. Yet I'm choosing this day to power up!

To be honest, I didn't invest a single penny in fiat to power up my account. All STEEM in my account is earned through this platform only. So I can't boast that I bought this much STEEM at today's ultra-low market prices. No I didn't buy it!

Yet, the decision to power up didn't come easy to me.

Why I'm powering up?

Frankly, I've no solid reasons to do so. My last post is still open for suggestions and I'm still looking for a great reason to power up STEEM. If you have one, do share it with me.

So far, I've received suggestion to invest in Tribe tokens instead. I also received one suggestion to lease out my SP to get a passive return. But I'm still looking for a better return than that.

However I'm powering up some amount today as a gesture in solidarity with the SPUD and also the responses received on my post.

The other reasons that made me put invested in STEEM do obviously include my looong association with the Steem ecosystem. You know, I already said that it's difficult for me to change the status quo once I get used to something. It takes a lot of effort to change and move to some new ecosystem.

One more thing in favour of Steem is that it has already earned a good recognition in the crypto sphere. And even if I contribute my writings to another blockchain or a blogging platform, I can continue to simultaneously publish the same content here too. And by powering up here or by continuing to publish here, I also get rewards in other blockchain tokens like ROX or SNAX too.

But familiarity with the Steem ecosystem is the biggest thing that keeps me active here. I'm too lazy to learn the new ropes. So I plan to continue to curate here with occasionally authoring posts here and there while I keep looking for suggestions to put my STEEM to better use.

Well, whatever! But the point to be noted is that with such weak and not very encouraging tone, I'm still here and powering up some STEEM. I hope from here on @streetstyle will try to motivate me further.

Thank you all!

P.S.:

Since Steem sidechain sync is pending and replay is in progress, I'm stil waiting for my STEEMP to STEEM conversion through @steemfinex. As soon as I receive the required quantity of STEEM to match it with my current SP, I'll power it up.

UPDATE

It looks like SteemFinex has a long queue (of over 13K STEEMP) and my least priority transfer is being delayed. So I've arranged some temporary funds to keep up this power up commitment.

Here I'm powering up matching my current SP:

Well, no! The moment I spent in taking this screenshot increased my SP to 4029.700. So I actually powered up 4029.700 STEEM. Now my account with over 8000 SP looks like this:

8059.400 ...not bad! Let's see how long does it take to reach the 5 figure level.

I'm not planning to power it down and considering it it as being dumped and locked here in this wallet for a long long time, I dunno! However, I don't think I'm gonna invest anything more to it until I see any benefit in powering up.

What you guys think of it?