I read an [interesting article](https://theblockcrypto.com/2018/10/26/analysis-russia-and-venezuela-dominating-localbitcoins-volumes-an-intriguing-proxy-for-bitcoin-demand/) last night that @smooth shared. It was talking about how the demographic of countries using localbitcoins has shifted over the years, back in 2013 90% of the volume was coming from the U.S.A, U.K and Australia alone. Now the U.S is in 3rd place with 11.8% of the total volume while Russia is leading with 26.5% and Venezuela on second place with 12.2%. The reason a lot of shifting is occurring does not just mean that americans have stopped trading Bitcoin but it also depends on the development of trusted and better exchanges in the country. Instead of using LBC which does have hefty fees depending on the buyer, they might have switched to exchanges such as coinbase or others. 

What I wanted to bring up in this post as well is something that has bothered me over the months. There is a hivemind on r/cryptocurrency that Nano is so wonderful and amazing and most of the time anything related to that gets on the front-page in a regular basis. Now I am not against Nano, the tech is interesting and I'm sure the team developing it are doing a great job, but it seems as though other currenices that have just as good tech or potential to do what it does are getting swept under the rug by the masses there. I am guessing that since Nano is such a new coin and the recent development of the price that it had, seeing astronomical returns for early investors (from $0.01 to $34) and people that joined the crypto space during the hype of late 2017 has lead to a lot of newcomers holding it. The drop from $34 down to $0.90 at one point has place Nano in one of the worst performing altcoins of this year. So it doesn't surprise me that the current bagholders are doing what they can to spread the word abut it in hopes that it will get a lot of attention and correct itself through that effort while maybe leaving behind actual technological advancements or uncertainty.

This one time there was a post trending that mentioned the Nano community having donated ~$60 to a Venezuelan user who then went ahead and managed to buy a lot of food for his friends and family that were in need. This is all well and good and a big reason why cryptocurrency and altcoin solutions are so important but the mere fact that a post like this got so much attention while other currencies are doing something similar and in much greater numbers not receiving the same if not greater recognition due to the hivemind of the subreddit feels a bit wrong. Don't get me wrong, what the Nano community did was really awesome and I respect them for it. Out of shear interest I went ahead and asked a data compiler here on Steem for some information.

I asked him if there was a way to scan the blockchain for users on Steem that have the "location" field filled in with Venezuela and he responded with 16350 total accounts. We went further as to check how many had been active this month and that number dropped to 1735. That's understandable, it can't be easy for their community to receive a lot of support especially with curation currently being the way it is and distribution of bigger stakeholders not being the best, not to mention the bear market, etc. So out of curiosity I asked him one more thing, if he could check the data of rewards earned for this month by those 1735 active users. The outcome showed 8240 SBD and 8140 SP.

This may not seem like a lot to some of our high earners or users living in expensive countries, but for a platform as small as Steem currently is at this time and the price being as low as it currently is. Combined with the costs of buying things in said country I can imagine it is a huge help to those Steemians. Yet if you were to try and share stories about this anywhere outside Steem, even from their own users the manipulations would go wild and the posts would often times get downvoted or negative comments would come up talking about Steem's early inflation or lack of distribution. How they think DPOS is not a real blockchain, linking to videos of Tone Vays, etc.

https://images.pexels.com/photos/1108572/pexels-photo-1108572.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&dpr=2&h=750&w=1260

All I'm saying is that Steem to this day still remains a very undervalued and often times underappreciated blockchain which is a bit sad considering how hard many users here try and spread the word about this amazing technology we have and how easy it is for newcomers to get introduced to it. This is more an issue of Reddit than it is for Steem but many investors are not looking into Steem because of early judgement or this stigma to always ignore our blockchain even though it has time after time again proven to outperform most of them in many ways than just the technical aspects.

I understand that the situation in a country like Venezuela is difficult, users may even be afraid to promote Steem even if they see how well it works and how much it helps them due to their laws and the need to use black markets or localbitcoins. There are other countries out there though that Steem is quite popular in as well and it is a bit disheartening that some users don't make more of an effort to promote what we already got here. I am hoping things will improve over time in that aspect as well, we all know how much promotion the bull market makes on its own combined with being a top currency on coinmarketcap which is still quite high on alexa traffic rankings. I just wish the efforts of the Steemit team to work on the back-end mostly and make sure it is ready for mass adoption won't go to waste because of the ongoing dissing of Steem by outsiders who probably haven't even bothered to look deeper into it since the early days and are completely not aware of the development and amount of dapps and activities we have going on here even at possibly the bottom of the bearmarket.

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[Image Source Pexels.com]

#### Thanks to @abh12345 for the provided blockchain statistics.

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