There's a lot of debate lately and honestly I'm glad to see it. I've throw out ideas on both fronts around the APR changes for Hive and HBD and I've learned a lot in the process as well as found a lot of constructive feedback and viewpoints. I wanted to state that first as I feel like it's a big step in the right direction for hive compared to how changes like this used to go down.
There's more talk about voting, better understanding and easier ways to connect and talk to the community outside of articles which is now Threads Is if perfect? Is it the greatest? No of course not but it's growth in the right direction. No matter how good something is there is always room to learn, grow and be better.
The Value Of Hive
Right now we are starting to see the value of hive really slump. It feels like more money is being poured into HBD and a vast portion of it is leaving the hive token.
This could be from the 20% APR or It might not be but here's the part I don't get.
Why should a passive income source that has no vote weight and a lot less risk compared to hive have double the APR compared to an asset that has vote weight, contributes to the security of the platform have less APR?
Does The APR Matter?
To me the only thing that should change is reducing the APR of HBD down to a more reasonable level that doesn't lopsided the scale of earning so heavily on the passive income not contributing to the voting side of things and instead it be more balanced. At current APR levels that would make me personally believe to achieve that HBD APR should be a little lower than that of a non stable coin asset like HIVE so that brings me in around 5% - 7% APR on HBD. Which as much as someone wants to say it's still a high APR. It's still paying more than a bank and in many cases better than a stock. Perhaps 8% APR on HBD is the sweet spot.
What We Might Need To Focus On
That aside though I think we are starting to attack and talk about wrong things.
The price of hive reflects how much someone wants the asset and what can be done with that asset.
As someone mentioned that runs an application themselves having a large stack of Hive makes sense to them. It helps them reward the content creators using their UI, it allows them to vote for witnesses and other aspects which benefits their application running on top of the hive blockchain.
At some point (when enough applications are built and hives inflation becomes crazy low (10 years from now) it's going to be mainly application focused over user focused as a resource/reward/vote reason to hold hive over what I feel is a constant push to tell people the following.
Hive continues to brand itself as a article, content, get paid to, web3 platform or blockchain. Of which the mindset of that is going to always be oh I can post content, get paid for it and then cash out. It's the mindset of many and you can't be mad at them for thinking otherwise. People post content on youtube because ultimately they want to get paid. The post on socials because they want to get paid. While there is a subset to that of a few people that do it for fun a majority of the wealth, income and money comes from creating good content that gets you paid.
Thus the mindset here is get paid in hive, cash it out for your work/content and no real push is ever done as to why you might want to keep and hold hive.
This is where the real issue is with hive above anything else. This constant charity, exit of wealth and nothing to replace it. Hive doesn't generate income it has no ads it has nothing to bring worth back in.
We finally saw a glimpse of what it means for people to want hive when Splinterlands took off during the bull market. Outside of that I don't think hive would have moved nearly as much as it did during the bull run.
People wanted hive, to earn it and build wealth in it and to buy it so they could buy assets in Splinterlands along with all the trading that took place.
We are just now after 2 years starting to once again get whispers of what a layer two token would do that had ad revenue and used a smart contract to buy back that value. That might not seem like a lot or sound like much but to me is exactly what Hive needs.
The layer two token with ads now provides not only income for the application to run on it's own without a constant sink to hive from the DHF but it also returns that value back to the users/content creators. While I'm STILL waiting for this to take place with LEO so we can finally show this method works (Because it will it's been proven by web2 applications like youtube, twitter and the likes) once that happens my hopes are that others start to follow.
For example 3speak should be running ads on their videos and either evergreening that value back into the content creators while keeping some to fund and fuel their development efforts.
Other front ends should also be doing the same. I agree that the DHF could be used for new projects at first however after a period of time say a year it's either that app needs to figure out how to raise their own funds or it comes crashing down.
There are of course cases where the DHF should be used and that's non applications of which wouldn't get funding from outside methods like ads. This makes sense to pay and reward the core developers in this way.
In general what we are seeing now and the real issue here is nothing more then far too many exit sinks for hive and too little value for Hive itself. You can see that clear as day in the constant falling price.
These are just my two cents on what's really going on. But what I love the most is we are all talking about this, starting to throw out ideas and hopefully figure out real values, build wealth etc. So let's take action and start coming up with some great ideas to make hive strong!