Things aren't as they appear

One thing I believe is important to note in this space is that things aren't as they may seem at first glance. I think @theycallmedan and @starkerz are good proponents with their @threespeak solutions who often mention these kind of things in web2 with often not many around to hear it.

It's weird, feels like the more this technology gets adopted the further it shifts from the core ideas and solutions it was created to solve. I'm not going to get into the whole "what would Satoshi think about Bitcoin if he was still around today" and the forks of it that may or may not be more in line with what the innovation was trying to solve. Although it'd be very interesting to hear his thoughts on Hive as I kind of doubt he thought entry to bitcoin would be this difficult and 99.999% of users having to buy it to use while it only rewards people with mining-specific computers that are out of reach for most regular joes.

Exchanges are the window to access but hold a lot of power. While Hive got lucky in a way to be treated with respect due to certain exchanges being one of the reasons it had to be created, which now turns out to have been for the better that things went the way they did. They mostly just care about money to no one's surprise. If you create a new coin/project you have a much higher chance if you launch it through their launchpads so the exchanges can get a big part of your supply to distribute towards their own coin holders and generate fees from the trades. 0.075% to 0.15% fees may not sound like a lot but trade it back and forth enough times and you have an exchange with a growing amount of stake in your coin that it can sell consistently or at the right time to affect the market and price movement. They're not going to list coins based on how decentralized and in tune with satoshi's vision they are or what the coin is doing, they're only going to consider listing them if they're generating enough volume on competing exchanges to not miss out on customers and fees.

To list tokens without their initial interest for the couple things mentioned above they're going to require you to pay for it. Hive has been lucky to be listed on such exchanges but in hindsight I do wonder how much of the liquid hive residing on them belongs to them and not their customers.

The other great thing about Hive is that active users who understand it enough don't keep their Hive on the exchanges, maybe just a portion to trade with when activity in price fluctuations rises. Someone who's been holding Hive, let's say since its creation on Binance and hasn't traded it but waiting for that 10-50x would have lost out on about 40-50% to inflation by now. Over time as we're creating more hive the liquid Hive outside of the blockchain loses value compared to total supply but at the same time there's a lot of users selling it off as well so it's a question between can inflation and active users here stay powered up enough to beat the funneling back to liquid hive on exchanges. That's something that's not easy to do in this economy.

There are stakeholders who are more elaborate on how they stake hive and don't have to rely on it while there are others who either sell it as soon as they get it no matter the price or in short periods. I don't personally think that's a bad thing, it shows that Hive works and is being distributed fairly in terms of effort and contributions provided to the ecosystem in different ways, but I thought it'd be important to compare to our legacy shitchain and why the price differences may be so similar at times like these.

As @arcange hilariously failed out to point in the hivefest clip and was saved by @gandalf a few seconds later, development on the shitchain has been close to 0 since our departure.

Looking at the log price of Hive and Steem you'd see something like this:

Hive currently only being 3 marketcap spots in front of Steem on coingecko.

At first glance as an outsider you'd think we'd be neck in neck in development, scaling, marketing, etc, but in reality hive is streets ahead. So why doesn't this reflect on the marketcap?

In short, both coins at this time are quite "hidden" to the mainstream "hype", people may think both are failed projects and it's not easy to get traffic to our development or in general anything happening here that's important. It's easy to see that official hiveblocks on x mostly only gets likes from people already here, how few likes hivefest gets while some dumb token2049 gets all the rage while it's filled mostly with people who made it big on memetokens and shilling random coins they got paid for in those coins. We are quite literally hidden in plain sight, close to no one active and understanding of hive has a real presence outside, those who may have had and have been rewarded greatly never bothered to bring anyone here or attempt to.

Hive gets sold a lot more, now this may not seem like a big thing but when daily volumes are as low as they are currently for both coins in question, it might matter. Even the few investors that know the ball is in hive's court and are choosing hive over steem may not be enough to compensate for the sales that happen here. Why does Hive get sold more?

Something many may not realize is that Steem isn't only stuck in development where it was in 2020 but the "bid bot" era never stopped there neither. It's not hard to take a look at their trending and realize it's constantly the same people on there and only those with stake. It's like they bypassed direct vote-selling (even though that still happens a lot) and opted for receiving votes based on delegations. Look at the @tipu account on hive and the one on steem, here there's no selling of votes occurring while there that's all it does. Look at @trafalgar here, no posts while there he's constantly trending, delegating their stake away in exchange for the big votes on a daily post. To put this in perspective, most inflation of new steem is staying with the investors and stakeholders, there's close to no genuine curation occurring so you don't see authors getting a lot of rewards they can sell. You don't see developers getting SBD from a DAO they can sell.

I'm not saying there may not be any selling occurring, looks like Sun sold most of the Steemit stake a few years ago but compared to Hive it's become quite a "proof of stake" chain where content is just a placeholder to collect returns. It'd be like if @ocdb only voted for @darthknight and @blocktrades 90% of its daily voting power while they did a daily shitpost that'd get to trending and everyone else was left with scraps. Honestly, I'm surprised people are still trying there and it's also a reason I get disappointed when I see some continue to provide them with value there by posting genuine content while also being here.

Now don't get me wrong, this selling of Hive is not something I'm against, the inflation of new Hive to authors and curators isn't that much and looking at other coins and garbage out there it's just a drop in the bucket, especially at these prices. I'm just trying to give you a perspective on why the prices may be so correlated to each other. To many outsiders they most likely have no idea of the differences and think of Hive just as a fork similar to ETH and ETC or BTC and BCH and hive is quite unique there because it's one of the few that has outdone its predecessor.

Following up on that, I think it's important to imagine that not everything may be as it seems. A lot of these coins, although hard to kill completely won't be around actively for the next few years. Many new ones will pop up, some more legit than others looking for actual long term change and impact while some just looking to profit a few early investors or founders. Something to be careful of when investing in what you see out there, web2 is generally full of fakeness I've noticed and it's only going to get worse with the rise of AI and cheaper fake activity due to it.

Anyway, that's probably enough text for one post. Appreciate people reading it and leaving their thoughts on it.