Just some of the many odd thoughts I've had over the last months.
Some who speak about wanting lower prices have gone silent now, either that or they say prices will go even lower so they're trying to "time it".
There's been a few users correctly predicting we'll hit sub 5 cents, something I obviously didn't expect as I've been buying and powering up all the way since 70 cents down to 20 cents, now just looking to power up random earnings here and there. Yet they're suddenly gone now, either not interested in buying or thinking it'll drop lower.
The blocks keep on being produced however and inflation keeps on being directed by those remaining staked.
Some kept complaining that participating in governance is too expensive and that a few hold too much power and can control the DHF as they wish, etc. Yet now that their power, in terms of usd at least, has been diminished quite a lot, to the point where simply powering up 50m HP, less than what 
To give you another example, one of the biggest holders, 
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining that no one is stepping up, I'm merely looking at things from my own perspective. If I had been smarter about when I bought Hive back or about having more eggs in the basket, I'd never question buying more Hive here, in fact I would've probably made the same mistakes and bought way earlier. Would I buy here if I still could however? Yes.
Now that may just be me, and a few other stakeholders I know still here and active and who've also shown signs of buying more Hive at lower prices. But it does make me wonder why others don't seem to see this as the same opportunity that I would.
Is crypto dead? Did AI kill it?
Those are weird questions to me, for one because the former has always been asked anytime we've been in similar situations and two because the latter I think works really well with crypto.
Mainly however because things in the world still remain unchanged. Freedom of speech hasn't improved much, community notes are a joke on that one platform you may be thinking of when you hear "freedom of speech", and they're still banning people for certain views and content while allowing outrageous clickbait to grow rampant. I wonder what the former owners of Twitter think about it today. Similar to its "competitor" bluesky things have been a lot more centralized and anti-freedom of speech than one could've expected given how big game they talked about decentralized tech starting out. The rest of the social media platforms have just become corporations chasing AI because that's where the money is now while disregarding how it affects users, not that they ever cared about that.
I deeply think that the community with its own distributed stake is a better moderator than any of these platforms can ever become. It's this sawtooth function where there's always a bigger fish in the sea and doing malicious things easily spreads around to the right ears.
Let's assume I'd go "bad actor", and I'm not talking about the loud little voices blurting out garbage because they got rightfully downvoted, I'm talking about actual malicious reward-pool activity. Let's say I started downvoting someone who does well here for no good reason, some would be all "their (delegated) stake - they can do what they want with it) as we've heard often (which I don't fully agree with and probably never will), while others will be like, "that's odd", and they'd share my activity around until it reaches someone who'll take a look at it and be like "this doesn't make any sense". And this someone would have more stake than me or have connections to someone who delegates stake to me, do you think they'd just remain silent? No, why should they, they're invested in the platform, they wouldn't want a valuable member of the community to get needlessly downvoted for no good reason cause it may affect their own stake badly. They'd speak up as would many others, actual malicious actions would ring very loud across the platform, especially if completely unprompted and unjustified. This would mean I'd eventually serve repercussions for my malicious actions, the community would attempt to counter the downvotes with their stake (even at a small cost in terms of curation returns), they'd make sure the news spread so others delegating to myself or any of my projects would remove their delegations (which has happened in the past for certain reasons which I'm fine with), and if I'd be actively posting I would face some downvotes potentially as well due to my actions. If I then doubled down to start downvoting people back because of this, it'd only make everything worse of how the community perceives me.
My point being, while downvotes aren't perfect, this sure is way better than how other platforms are handling things.
For shadowbans where the creators don't even know if certain creators can even read their posts (youtube has this), to actual community-wide or platform-wide censorship where you can't write anything on there to complete blocking of your account you may have worked hard on for years, all while the platform and its users aren't affected by at all. They don't and won't care, even if they do care there's nothing they can do because most of these platforms only have AI as support now who don't care to figure out if you got banned rightfully or not, there's very few actual souls checking if you should've gotten banned/downvoted which here is possible since all actions are public and open and one doesn't need to be a genius to figure out if someone is maliciously downvoting a person or if they have a good excuse to do so.
I've seen so much chatter over the last months discussing DHF spendings yet very few actively care about how we're distributing our reward pool. Many asking for downvotes for the DHF yet never taking a second to check if they should rightfully use theirs on hive to combat farms/etc which do still exist and are happening even at the lows.
Last note, I'm still seeing so many users hold on to their HBD rather than pick up some stake, many who've been around for years if not close to a decade. Sure one can argue we may go lower and they may get a better deal out of it but I'd argue some don't even care to have stake or get back into the game. What does that say about them that they'd rather hold onto a token pegged to fiat than actively contribute to distribution of stake for future stakeholders in our ecosystem. Maybe they weren't so much about the community after all, or they've completely lost hope in Hive. I don't know.
End rant.
Random banner I had grok generate quickly.
