I read an article the other day that mentioned CEO's making record salaries this year even though there's been huge layoff's post-covid, not sure how true it was with inflation and everything but it's been something on my mind in general with the way things are in the world.
I'm not gonna go into the whole 1% or the 1% of the 1% and the absurdity of money they make compared to the rest of people but I really wanna emphasize why I think the way money is earned needs to change in the future.
It is weird to me that in this day and age where automation is becoming the norm, renewable energy is becoming more widespread popular, we still have people who have to work all day to make ends meet.
I'm fortunate enough to have been raised in a country where even if you have 0 money you won't end up on the streets, so I can't imagine what it'd be like being in such a situation and the stress and fear working people must constantly be in.
It's not surprising that most tv shows or movies I watch the plot often revolves around money, work and the issues that brings to families and people.
Anyway, point of making this post was simple. There's a lot of things branding themselves as web3 these days, but are they really web3?
What does it mean to own stake in a network?
I still see a lot of people comparing things to the old outlets, let's take for instance Hive earnings compared to Youtube revenue.
"I want lifetime rewards for my blog, 7 days is not enough to get upvotes for something that may garner attention in the long run and profit the blockchain".
This is one of the "big" reasons many say that content here may not be as great as it is on the outside, let's pick apart some things with this sentence.
The reason posts payout after 7 days is what I've been told is network bandwidth, the blockchain would need too much data stored in memory for too many posts for too long which would make it slow, in layman's terms, not that I could explain it any more technical. I'm not sure if this is less of an issue these days after the work blocktrades and team have done towards improving and making the chain scale better, but let's go with it staying 7 days as I haven't read any recent discussions about changing that.
A "simple" solution to this would be an active post or comment, anywhere. Let's say for instance someone lands on your amazing post from 5 years ago and has staked up a lot of hive, he wants to reward you with an upvote but the post is too old, so he checks on your current activity and throws you a vote there instead. You may not know it was because of that old post you got the vote and a new follower unless they told you.
However leaving "constant" comments under that very post would easily enter abuse territory, cause what you don't want to happen is the same voters/stake voting for the same content over and over. Those are simply the community guidelines, you gotta consistently post to get the same voters to reward you over time. Sure this may make your content a bit more spammy/less effort but that's your decision as a content creator which can have different effects on your future vote rewards.
Now let's think about hive in and of itself. Did you know hive power offers you more hive power over time? Without even voting your HP grows by around 3.17% per year, that means that if you have 1000 HP on January 1st, you will have 1031.7 HP the same date next year, although slightly higher as it compounds. If you also curate, which on average gives you 8.5% APR, putting the yearly return over 11%.
If you made a post very early when this chain was launched, and it earned 100 HP in rewards, not counting the changes in APR over time, that 100 HP would now have grown over 2x since.
Without getting too much more into details. Ask yourself this. What other blockchain rewards their users most of their inflation? Aside from miners keeping the network secure, very few do and hive has done so for over 8 years now.
The whole question regarding "evergreen" rewards is so broken to begin with when you consider that earning on any other web2 platform doesn't give you shares in their company.
Do you think the people to first upload to youtube got shares from their views that google had to buy off of them later?
Another important thing to keep in mind is that google doesn't lose money when you make money, their shareholders are unaffected. They're only sharing with you part of the advertisement money they receive to place ads on your videos. You are working for them.
Furthermore, nothing is stopping hive front-ends from enabling the same models, so you'd earn stake and ad revenue at the same time. Do you think others will be able to beat that?
Okay, I'm going on a tangent again. I guess the issue we have these days is lack of conviction, not enough people believe that Hive will become the next big thing and there surely haven't been a lot of great signs lately leading us to believe so. At the same time, however, there haven't been any other competitors popping up either that will forfeit most of their inflation towards real people.
Do you think Elon would give people twitter shares along with adrevenue? He owns that platform and with all the changes its been having lately it should be clear that he can do whatever he wants with it. If witnesses on Hive started proposing some absurd changes everyone could vote them out of that top position to be powerless to campaign for those changes, not to mention you'd need 17 of the top 20 to agree to them in the first place.
Even if Hive doesn't become the next "big" thing somehow, it'll always be a thing. That's something hard to wrap your head around for some people but look at all the dumb memecoins and things you see having "value" these days. How the stock GME is pumping because some people just like it and want to mess with shorters trying to profit off of a dying company.
There's a lot of people who sell Hive due to the economy, and I understand that, you don't often hear people say "ugh wish I hadn't sold" even though it's had its pumps 3-4 times over the course of its life-time where those sellers would've made more had they held for them. There's also a lot of other shiny objects out there and people can't get them as easy as they can earn hive, so they may trade hive for the more shiny coins in everyone's minds these days and then find it hard to buy back hive because "ehh I'll earn it back by posting".
All I'm trying to say with that is that the period of earning back your stake is enclosed. Hive still has 10 years or so of reduced inflation that'll end at 0.5% yearly, but a decade isn't that much time. Your reputation and activity isn't going to give you rewards forever, at least not in the form of stake compared to the total supply of Hive.
Reduced inflation also means that the HP from this post I may generate won't be 2x in 10 years time, so it is already affecting our stake earning potential compared to how it used to be in the last 8+ years.
Voting will also change, stake will switch hands, delegations will change. You never know what's going to happen. Never having any stake on your account is a bet against Hive failing. Think about that for a minute. If you constantly sell everything you earn, you are either saying A. Hive is going to die and go to 0 or B. I will make it back before it pops off or C. I don't care either way.
The more people that join the less stake you're going to earn, that's just how the platform is designed. There's more and more orca's and whales now that distribute inflation manually, automatically or a hybrid of the two. They're not always going to support you to continuously earn stake and if someone more interesting comes along than you they're going to forget about you, whether they want to or not, that's just how attention works.
Anyway, I'm going to post this in the rant community cause it went way off the rails than what I initially wanted to write about, but thanks for reading my sleep deprived post anyway. Been quite busy lately, a lot of things to do with Zing but happy to be able to get started with some of them that required funding. Also happy to be able to backpay some people who've been kind enough to wait on their payments for the survival of the project's sake. Thank you to those, and while I do plan on giving people bonuses for their patience and integrity, I'm going to make damn sure that similar to Hive, Zing won't become another company that if it makes it big only profits the founders, CEO's, shareholders and what have you. That shit is over and a new era has come, whether web2 likes it or not, it'll have to adapt or die.
