This week we asked the community a question in the context of the weekly Liotes Mission. We wanted to ask what they thought was an appropriate return on interests for HBD in savings. We tried to asked this question in an open fashion without judging.
It was very interesting to see the participation and the quality of the answers we got. I deducted that people really care and would like to understand better what is at stake. Also it matters directly to them and I believe they should have say when it comes to such decisions. I was quite surprised to see that many were looking at it with a lot of realism and by far not everybody was in favour of the status quo.
These answers started a process in me in which I wanted to see how Hive is evolving. I see a lot of pessimism these days. I believe that it's better to look at things in an objective manner and for that I like to look at numbers. I love to look at the reports by 
Well, I actually looked at two sets of posts to compare the numbers. One set of posts was regarding the data from the 31st of january 2023 (post 1, post 2) and another set of posts was looking at the data from the 31st of january 2024 (post 1, post 2).
The first question I wanted to ask myself was how the savings of HBD are evolving since last year. For that I simply compared the numbers. The amount of HBD in savings has increased by around 55% in one year. However the number of accounts who save HBD only increased by around 13%. The amount of HBD per account increased by 37%.
So what does that tell us?
The growth of HBD in savings is pretty consequent. In 2023 the percentage of Hive locked in HBD represented 3%. Today, it represents 5%. There are more accounts who save HBD now but the increase was much smaller. What we can see is that it's mainly the size of the HBD in savings that increased.
If the 20% on HBD was meant to attract a lot of users, it worked not that well. It's rather the same people who have more in savings and earn more from it.
This is something that I found very interesting. Hive in the form of HBD increased by 2% and liquid Hive also increased by 2%. But the part of Hive in the form of Hive Power decreased by 4%. So, People reduce Hive Power in favour of liquid hive and HBD savings. I believe that this isn't that great in terms of price and stability for Hive. The percentage of Hive in its staked form is today only 32% of the total supply. It was 36% a year ago!
Another interesting question that I wanted to have a look at is how the decentralisation on hive is evolving. I wanted to see mainly how the ranks (whales, orcas, dolphins, minnows and planktons) have evolved over a year. And how much each of these ranks owns in terms of Hive Power.
| Indicator | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Number of Whales | 36 | 39 |
| Number of Orcas | 259 | 271 |
| Number of Dolphins | 1662 | 1745 |
| Number of Minnows | 8905 | 8943 |
| % owned by Whales | 48.55 | 48.25 |
| % owned by Orcas | 22.73 | 22 |
| % owned by Dolphins | 14.87 | 15.75 |
| % owned by Minnows | 8.54 | 8.65 |
I deduct from these numbers that all categories are growing in number and also that the percentage owned by whales and orcas has actually gone a bit down in favour of the wealth owned by dolphins and Minnows. This shows a slow tendency towards decentralisation of wealth which is nice but could be faster.
When I look at all these numbers, from a very personal point of view, I see several things that I would like to write down. First of all, Hive is growing in terms of users. Maybe the activity isn't that great but the number of transactions are not lower than a year ago. I also see a step toward decentralisation of wealth which I believe is very important for the nature of the blockchain.
What I like less is the reduction of the staking rate. I believe that here the high return on HBD comes into play. Putting HBD into savings gives a better return and in addition is less a hassle than curating content with Hive Power. In addition you can take HBD out of savings within 3 days and you need to wait 13 weeks to unstake Hive Power. It's totally understandable that people go rather towards HBD than HP. However, this means also that there is maybe less focus given to curation and content creation. If less people own hive power and less people are curating, it weakens the very thing that makes hive special and that encourages decentralisation of wealth.
This is definitely a very emotional discussion and I see also a lot of ideological reasoning around it. The Liotes Mission showed that not everybody sees the 20% as being the best solution. I also realised that many people wondered where these 20% were actually coming from. The thing is that these interests are defined by the witnesses and they come in addition to the coded hive inflation. Basically the HBD interests are freshly minted tokens that increase the inflation. The bigger the savings are, the more exponential this HBD inflation will become because of compound interests. There is a price to pay for these 20% and we are actually all paying it by diluting the Hive and HBD that we own.... According to the law of offer and demand, if demand stays the same (and we didn't really manage to increase the demand in spite of the 20%) and the offer is increasing (more tokens in circulation), the price will go down... The more HBD interests are printed, the more we push hive prices down and the faster we will get towards the haircut where the peg for HBD will be lost.... This is something that should be avoided at all cost because it will not only reduce the value of all HBD, it will also undermine Hive and accelerate the negative price evolution.
@ph1102, I'm running the 
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