Noun

1. A structure, whether artificial or natural, for housing a swarm of honeybees.
2. The bees of one hive; a swarm of bees.
3. A place swarming with busy occupants; a crowd.

We'll just ignore that fourth noun definition...

Verb

1. To enter or possess a hive.
2. To form a hive-like entity.
3. To collect into a hive.
4. To store in a hive or similarly.
5. To take shelter or lodgings together; to reside in a collective body.

Thanks Wiktionary!

That's what hive means to me, along with referring to a shiny new social blockchain forked from Steem to undermine a hostile takeover and undo the ninja mine in the last week or so. Maybe one day there will be a fifth noun definition on the Wiktionary page. Though considering the weak coverage of Steem on it's Wikipedia page I'm not holding my breath.

Alright I'm going to more seriously answer now that I've got that impulse out of the way. I won't be linking to Twitter though since I have no account there and probably will go to my (untimely COVID-19 induced?) grave without one. I also won't be using the 'posh' tag since I don't really know what it's all about and I don't really want mindless extra upvotes regardless of the financial benefit. It's no wonder I'm poor. I also don't really like the concept of being posh.

What is HIVE to you?

Well it's a new unit of account first of all. The launch of it's new distributed ledger represents to me an attempt at greater equity for our stakeholders and community more broadly. By removing the ninja mine we can get out from under the thumb of Steemit Inc. and it's unfairly acquired stake's power. It's also a symbolic gesture in response to Justin Sun's hostile takeover of our community that we're willing to do what we must to throw off tyranny imposed by greedy exchanges and venture capitalists alike. It's a testament to our belief in censorship resistance and our resilience in the face of attempts at censorship. It's not all sunshine and rainbows though in my opinion.

There is the fact that in some sense we've undermined one of our fellow stakeholders of their significant stake. Not so much in that it doesn't exist, since we've really copied everything, but if we migrate and take the value with us it's effectively worthless. While I support and respect the reasons for doing this there's a tiny itch in the back of my mind that says it sets a precedent that something similar could happen to any of us. I don't imagine that is likely to happen however. A successful hard fork is quite an undertaking, something not to be taken lightly. We didn't take it lightly in this case, and honestly it seems to me that it has done more to unite us than divide us. But what do I know?

To illustrate the possible inappropriateness of something like this let's look to Bitcoin. What happened to Steem would be analogous to forking Bitcoin simply to remove or redistribute the Satoshi coins. There is huge opposition in the Bitcoin community to doing things like that, and for good reason. Bitcoin is meant as peer to peer cash, an immutable public ledger of balances and transactions. Anything that undermines that, like modifying it to destroy Satoshi's stake, would lay waste to it's value proposition and decimate confidence in it's underlying utility. Even just changing the rules slightly, like in Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Gold, has done a number on the resulting network's value compared to the blockchain from which they were born. Of course Steem is not Bitcoin, and it's not like Satoshi Nakamoto is wielding that stake at all let alone to lord over the network. Value on Steem is not only as a payments system but also as a social medium, so the expectations are significantly different. There are reasonable arguments why such action is more appropriate in that setting and it's a lot more grey than the situation in Bitcoin. Still I get the inkling that there's some non negligible likelihood Hive might not retain the higher dollar price it currently enjoys over Steem. The day is still young, so to speak. Maybe I'm just overdoing the fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

What do you want to see HIVE evolve into?

I want to, perhaps somewhat obviously, see this new community evolve in a way that undoes what disappointed me about Steem while retaining and expanding everything that I thought was beneficial. I'd like to not see flag wars, circlejerks and sock puppetry. I want to see enhancement of community engagement, and meaningful discussion over empty vote exchange. Moreover I'd be delighted to realize augmentation of what see as the most important opportunity introduced by Steem, putting the value of content created and published here directly into the hands of those who make that content. This flies in the face of the model of more mainstream social media like Facebook or YouTube. On those platforms the founders extract all of the value, and only begrudgingly foist over a pittance to the very most influential creators under pain of loss of credibility and confidence. This is one of the greater travesties of contemporary art in my opinion, and maybe by way of blockchain and community action we might overcome it.

I'd also like to see Hive become a platform for various open source distributed apps and for the dissemination of factual journalism that would otherwise be censored

What do you think about having a large funded DAO for future HIVE development?

I'm deeply suspicious of the DAO. It seems to me another vector for possible abuse, especially with stake weighted voting for proposals. In my opinion it could easily be bent to the interests of a few whales over the desires of the community. I'd be more accepting if it was not stake based and every vote counted equally. I know stake based voting can make me feel demoralized as well as essentially disenfranchised from the process, and I'd wager I'm not alone.

It seems to me that the platform has a native way of funding anything at all in a more organic way and that is via our reward pool. I do think there are tough issues with important things like development competing with (and likely out-competing) the various valuable miscellany that get posted every day. That's already stake weighted anyway however so I might be somewhat standing on my head to advocate using our reward pool over a DAO fund. I wouldn't consider myself particularly well informed in this arena, but it doesn't seem to me that there are any easy answers.

What does HIVE mean to you?

This one seems a bit redundant in that I've largely gone over this already, but I'll make some attempt to answer it and summarize.

To me Hive means community. It's our opportunity to do what we couldn't or wouldn't on the old network. It's a risk as well, but one rarely finds a worthwhile opportunity without risk. Hive, like Steem, means global discourse between people who otherwise would have no contact. I think that's valuable, even if not in a monetary sense, and can work to better us all.

Thanks for reading!

See you around the hive!