All of us, almost without exception, had this idea that the profits we would make on the steem platform would be directly correlated with the amount of contributions we could make.

I'm one of the exceptions; I learned this lesson in other places and other times. But one thing I will say about it: for an intelligent person in their twenties unlearning this single expectation for the future is something I would value in the neighborhood of 200,000 Steem. Those who are older and don't have as much runway might not do as well, but it should still allow quite a few opportunities that might have been missed otherwise.

(Except, I suppose, in the other direction where my profits on the platform are directly correlated with the amount of contribution they allow me to make.)

As for the rest of the post, I've been slowly reading Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700 by Richard von Glahn. It has a lot of interesting things to say about multiple-currency systems where one currency was used primarily as a store of value and a different one was used as a means of exchange. It's a deep book on a deep subject and I'm still processing a lot of it. But it's definitely influencing my thoughts about Steem and BTC.