I got around to read all the 3 body problem books after watching the first season of it on Netflix. I'm kind of that person that can't wait to find out how it continues, especially not a show that's most likely going to take another 4 years for all 3 or 4 seasons to be released. I was originally going to write about this in the hive book club community but dunno, I'm not really great at reviews and either go into details about spoilers and what my thoughts are about them or don't talk enough about the main plot. I did read the first book as well though because I figured netflix often changes things around so it'd be difficult ti pick up from the 2nd book after just watching the series. To my lack of surprise, that was the case, the story mostly occurs in china and has very few characters outside of it, especially in the first book compared to the show having most of them in UK and one character now being 2 or 3 for some reason.
Instead of giving you a review of a tv show that was popular a few months ago and most of you have forgotten about already, I wanna talk about something that came to mind during an episode of the first season.
I'm sure this scene is stuck in most people's brains after watching the first season, but I'll try not to spoil for anyone reading this that hasn't watched it yet. The main thing I wanna discuss is the scenario and living arrangement by the people there.
Basically they live on a boat, they go and refuel every now and then but most of the time they live out in international waters where the laws aren't the same.
Alright, so what's up with that and how does it relate to hive?
Well, with governments and regulations seemingly coming down on currencies which I believe follow the path set up from Satoshi, I'd like to think about the worst case scenarios for decentralized currencies such as Hive. Decentralized has quite a lot of meanings to people these days, some would argue hive isn't because there's some people with a lot of stake and weight behind their votes but I don't think Hive has gotten a proper chance yet to show a well distributed aspect of it due to harsh markets. Eventually everyone will have their price and either sell or see others buy some Hive once we do get some more attention and potentially other users active today or later prefer to hold on to their earnings.
Either way, the main point of this post is, what if governments of countries started going after Hive. Let's assume for instance that Scandinavia was against this and made it illegal to host a hive witness on servers in the northern countries. ocd-witness would have to either relocate or be shut down and be voted off and another witness would take its place.
Let's now assume more countries would start doing the same and we'd see more and more witnesses drop off. Time to get worried, eh? Well, no not really. While it'd be more difficult to stay decentralized it would just limit to where we could run witnesses and with the amount of work the core team's been putting into Hive it is quite easy to run a lightweight witness nodes only requiring a handful of memory sticks.
Okay worst case scenario, all countries make it illegal. Well, now our only option is international waters I assume? I mean it's already kind of absurd that they would make it that illegal to begin with seeing as things here aren't that dangerous and we do have quite a nice community taking care of not rewarding such content and front-ends built on top of our chain removing content no one wants to see from sight. I.e. really, really illegal content that's disallowed everywhere for good reasons.
Okay what if international waters is also not enough? Well, I guess the next step would be to host witnesses on satellites.
Either way, while I don't think it'll ever get that far in terms of making it difficult to host witnesses to keep the chain going, I think it's safe to say that if it'd get there there would be technology to still make it possible to host in secret. Whether or not hive would be ran decentralized at that time or hoping the few people running these servers in secrecy won't hardfork the chain for the worse but are doing it for the love of freedom and survivability of this chain, eventually I believe we'd go back to being decentralized.
A lot of tech out there is being created with freedom in mind, and while the mainstream doesn't care about that much right now, I think over time people will come to see its true value in the long term.
Anyway, I'm not that tech-savvy so if I left out some important things here or didn't think things through properly, leave me a comment. It's kind of a random thought about something that may probably never occur anyway, hopefully.
