Two and a half months ago, I wrote a post about Hive's possible future. At the time, the HIVE price was over $0.24 and over 2000 satoshis. The HIVE price is currently around $0.13 and nearing 1000 satoshis, with an overall ROI of approximately -50%. HIVE is currently #134 in market cap.
I stand by this statement that I made in one of my comments:
"We clearly don’t have experienced social media devs and marketers. Our number of social media users is in the single-digit thousands after four years. But our chain is based on this primary value proposition...and it’s not working. Waiting for spikes in interest and FOMO purchasing of cryptocurrencies isn’t a successful strategy for the main product we have to offer."
HIVE continues to inflate at an official current rate of around 8% per year. There is no demand to absorb this inflation. There is not enough interest in the blockchain to attract large numbers of new users and to retain them. We have no experienced social media developers, designers, and marketers. The notion that "network effect" is going to be achieved via social media on this chain has not and likely will not materialize.
The token giveaway and distribution scheme is not working.
I don't know what will convince this community of these facts. It's convenient to ignore them as long as people can acquire and cash out the tokens for some minimal profit. But the profits continue on their steady decline and the number of bloggers on the chain follows the same path.
It isn't necessary to drive off of the cliff. We can turn the wheel and head in a different direction.
People come to crypto for different reasons but the primary one seems to be: To make money. In order to make money, they need to invest or trade tokens that can appreciate over time or have enough trading volume to take advantage of short-term swings. At the moment, Hive doesn't have much of either.
Another reason to get into cryptocurrencies is to use them as transactional currencies and to facilitate payments. I think this is where Hive can excel. We can take advantage of 3-second block times, free transactions, and personalized account names. These are features that many end-users want.
We have additional features on this chain that can also be marketed to those people, such as savings accounts and an internal marketplace for HIVE and HBD. We have most of the features and functions necessary to promote the blockchain to a large crowd of individuals and businesses looking for payment processors and other similar financial tools.
This is a much better proposition than trying to pull people from "Big Tech" on the basis of "censorship resistance" that most users don't care about - as evidenced by their unwillingness to leave the major social media platforms. It's also a better proposition than trying to convince popular social media personalities to move their operations to Hive in order to "get paid for posting," particularly when the potential pay is much lower than what they already get from advertising and sponsorship on their own. In other words: We cannot compete with existing social media platforms. And that's not even considering the huge differences in the interfaces and how communication between users is limited here.
So as I said in my previous post, we really need to consider getting rid of the social rewards from Hive and reducing overall inflation. Then the focus should be placed on improving HIVE Dollars and the financial tools we offer. In addition to that, we truly need some world-class documentation and APIs to attract more developers to this chain.
We will not achieve greater rates of adoption and development without better documents and tools for developers.
Tapping into the crypto developer community and making it easier for non-crypto devs to get involved with this chain should be our primary focus. We've wasted over 4.5 years trying to make social media happen on the main chain and it has gotten us nowhere. It's time to fish or cut bait - and I don't see anyone with waders and fishing rods around here.
There can still be rewards-based social media applications on Hive. There will still be gaming on Hive. We can still have witnesses, a development fund, and staking rewards. None of that necessarily has to go away or should go away. We just don't need everything crammed onto the main chain when it ends up making the chain unappealing to most potential users and investors.
We have seen that non-blogging applications on Hive can be attractive and popular, even to people outside of our bubble. We've even seen social media interfaces like LeoFinance do quite well on Hive with their own token distribution. It is absolutely possible to be successful outside of the primary value proposition for Hive's social media and token distribution scheme. Those efforts can be expanded and we can focus on making Hive's underlying financial tools more attractive and more robust for an exponentially greater number of users and investors.
This is not an either-or proposition. We can have it all. But we can't have it all on the base layer of Hive. After 4.5 years, it has proven itself to simply not be attractive. It's time that we choose a better direction.
It's one thing to go down with the ship when the sinking is unavoidable. It's not a noble thing to stubbornly head right into the iceberg. We have been heading for the iceberg for years, the alarms are going off, many people have already jumped ship, but much of the crew and passengers continue to shout, "Stay the course!" as the ship inexplicably goes on full-steam ahead.
It doesn't have to be this way. Let's do the thing.
