Yeah @papa-pepper is pretty amazing and things worked out well for him and his family and he keeps plugging away everyday.

Well there are two forms of circle jerking. There are the people who have a blog that revolves around talking about how amazing Steemit is. Then there are the circle jerkers who are in a tight alliance of 3 or 4 people who and they just vote for each other and hardly ever vote for anyone else.

And yes a person could power up a lot of STEEM and just essentially say Hi to themselves everyday and upvote it and you could say it could have a similar effect.

I would like to think we could entertain and inform each other on here at least a little bit while we earn money.

I would say if a person times things right and powers up $100,000 worth. I know that might sound insane but a person that has been in crypto long enough often observes that these alternative coins can potentially lose 90 to 95% of their value in a very bad crash. STEEM lost 98% of its value after it spiked to $4 in 2016 and fell clear to $0.07. I gave it a low chance to come back because things were so bad here but then it came back to life. Since it has proven itself to come back a couple of times now it becomes safer.

The calculations have been done before but basically my opinion is that if you power up $100,000 worth and primarily hog your vote or get in a tight agreement with a couple of others with that amount of power you could potentially double your money in a year if the price stayed the same. I know that sounds insane but you could crank 6-10 posts / day and you would get there. If the price went up as well the it could really play out nicely. But there is always the possibility the price gets crushed.

I certainly think that even if you aren't going to bring in money from outside that it is worth being on here and trying to earn as much as possible and try to bank on a large increase in price the next time crypto goes to the Moon.