The good thing about the price of Hive being at 4 cent is that the people who are posting regularly are staying around and there will be no moving them. They will not sell their stake out of sheer stubbornness which is great. They are like the band on the Titanic that stayed playing. Some have made money from crypto through the years and are happy to take the hit with Hive. Others think that there is no point selling now in the hope Hive will have a little revival. All we need is one killer Dapp. Some are extremely dedicated and it has become a vocation for them to post daily and they get anxious if they don't. Old Gil tells the wife to put on the kettle. He cracks his fingers and gets to work on a digital typewriter for a couple of sweet sweet Hive. Hive will never fall to zero because of these Old Gills plugging away with their large stake and I salute them.
So whoever you see on Ecency , Peakd , Discord or are still blogging are now the base user. Congratulations. Everybody knows everyone whether we like them or hate them but I think there should be an element of "We are in this together" now even if there is a couple of dickheads still knocking around the place. If you don't know any dickheads then chances are that you are the dickhead. But they are now "our" dickheads and we at Hive shan't have anything bad said them off chain.
The spectrum of opinions is so broad on Hive because we are truly global and this has its own challenges. Even before you bring politics or religion into it Hive will always have a debate raging somewhere and things get heated. One went on for 24 hours the other day and it was quite amusing. Discord is a place where everyone has an equal space and we can't agree on anything there so maybe it is for the best that there are a few large stakeholders that weight heavy on the decision making. But the point is if you want a larger say then stomp up the cash and power up.
Onboarding
There were a number of points mentioned in a Discord conversations this week which had me thinking the other night. If you onboard from the underdeveloped countries they will extract more Hive than they put in. I totally agree with this and you will see below this theory in action. The Hive Community have been beating the drum about volume of people onboarded but they might have not been the right people to onboard. A guy in the city of Columbo Sir Lanka is gonna care more about fixing the brake pads on his taxi that is essential for his survival than holding a stake worthy of upvoting some randomers for no benefit to himself. Hive is for people that are used to saving and are not really stuck for cash. Sometimes I think that some of us on Hive have had a pretty sheltered existence away from the hustle. I watched a Simpsons episode where the token nerds walk out of their university after being expelled and the criminal Snake is waiting for them. He says "Wallet Inspector" and the Hive witnesses nerds hand over their wallets.
Source
This is Hive through and through. We have the most talented devs and users here but some are not socially aware of what goes on in the streets. One look at the spendHBD community will give you all your answers to the street hustle taking place. Some lad with a sad face posing in front of a few groceries that are not paid for to earn a couple of Hive.
A charismatic hustler from the back streets Mogadishu used to elaborate scams to make $20 is Hive's worst nightmare. Think of the hoops he will jump through for an easy $1000. Jacinta from the Cotswolds with time on her hands setting up her book club before she goes to her holiday home in Murcia is Hive's dream on boarder. A couple of game designers are Hive's dream on boarders.
The fact that people can earn crypto for free is actually a disadvantage because it attracts the bums and the lackies, the flousies and the dossers. The people who do not have a pot to piss in. Remember a couple of years ago when the tap for crypto phase came in such as Hamster Kombat and Ton Station , Bloom, Hot Wallet etc. Millions of users tapped away to get these tokens. By the end of the summer after months of tapping they got about 2 quid worth of tokens. I wrote a post about it earning 6 dollars of Hive. If the same people spent this time writing a few posts they would have made more through rewards on Hive. The fact that millions of people were tapping for free crypto was worrying especially for the Hive blockchain. People will do anything for money , even the smallest amounts. In developed countries we could splash $10 on 2 americanos and not think twice. In Thailand $10 could last you a couple of days. Maybe a week if you are a native so the attraction is there to extract from Hive where in Norway it wouldn't be worth the effort.
DHF Spending
The Community have this down to 4 projects being funded now which is for the best in this current environment. I think it was very positive that there was so much uproar about the spending because people were taking the piss. They really were. Some accounts had very little staked that got the massive funding. This is Hive's largest weakness. In every blockchain in the world there is some rules regarding stake or buy in before any kind of funds can be extracted. If you want to be funded by the DHF project then a user should have at least 100k Hive in their account over the last 12 months. Having no skin in the game is a major warning sign. If you were a bank and some hobo comes in saying "I've got this crazy idea", would they give him a loan? Are you mad!?!
The HP threshold will drastically reduce the amount of people applying for funding. GOOD!!! In todays money 100,000 Hive is 4,000 euros. Not too much if you want funding and it does stop any dossers or bums from getting in in the first place. I used to get upset when a guy with 90 staked Hive received huge funding. I get back a reply saying that they are not keeping the money and they are using it all on merch and the like.
Yeah!! pull the other one, it has bells on it.
Then I look at photos of a conference (when there was some) and see a lad with no teeth stuck in his phone with two hive rubber bands on the table, a scar running down his face from a knife slash and a gold tooth earned from his cock fighting days.
There should be the absolute minimum stake needed for any funding including for DHF/ Valueplan applicants. If you need money for a conference then the person responsible should have 100k in Hive staked. Otherwise don't do the conference. Only 45 people turned up for the last Bitcoin conference. Several speakers did not show and it ended 4 hours early. One of our main conference organisers has $8 worth of Hive in her account at the minute. It is interesting to see some accounts after getting defunded have powered down, which speaks volumes but they had a good run of it overall and they should be delighted with themselves. I never had a problem with funding if it was for the good of Hive but not many are. The accounts with over 100k in their wallets are the accounts dedicated to Hive. Accounts like 
Lets take a look at some of the accounts that had massive funding over the last few years and what happens when the well dries up. This has no bearing on whether their projects were successful or not. I think we all know that answer. I am merely looking at account value to make a point and not why they were funded.That has been debated so many times. So if any of the below have another account where they are a Hive whale please let me know.
Arlette never really had skin in the game. When I quizzed her on it I got back that she was just a woman and living in her country was tough so I left her alone.
So in total Manuel made a tune of 371,836.34HBD and 27,853.00 Hive. Making him up in the top 1% of earners in Venezuela so plenty of time for motorcycling and romance.
Manuel's bestie Victor that did the street workout leaflets as a nixer for arouns 250 quid per month decided he wanted a piece of pie and took up cycling. He has slightly less HP stake skin in the game than Manuel. About tuppance less at account value $24.07
Victor Account Value $24.07 . Funded 60,063HBD AND 20,582 Hive
Total funded is for mazergaming is 62975.233 Hive and 39,365.00 HBD. Hive account Value is $1.12.
Take 
Joined November 2020 and has powered down ever since from any post rewards. These lads were hungry. A 20 HBD post and they were powering it down straight away. A simple look at their wallet is enough to tell you everything. Their last post was September 2025 and they were funded this year in 2026. On their website under news their last post is September 2025.Under upcoming events there is nothing. Great job!!!Oh wait I forgot about Youtube. Maybe they are huge there.
[looks up Youtube] Last video 2 years ago, 74 views.
Is this some Hive joke that non Hive people don't get , because I'm not fooking laughing!!!
I would get more views eating a banana. Oh but hang on a minute isn't Twitch the new place for all these gamers.
[Looks up Twitch] Last video 5 years ago. They have the Hive logo on their website under partners though. If you have Hive as your partners and are receiving over 62,000 Hive and 39,365 HBD. The least you can do is have some stake to at least pretend you are proper partners lads. Jeez Louise.
A couple of more major ex recipients have powered down their major stake or are currently powering down. Johnny "I live in England but supply wells in Ghana" 
Hives Indian hackathon guy 
Is this all a coincidence that when the well dries (no pun intended) up that our "Thank you to Hive. You are the best" recipients leave? If anyone has an idea of the condition of the 20 wells funded please send photos as it has been a persistent problem for NGO's in African countries that any material of value gets robbed within 6 months of the well being built. You can read about that here. In 2026 if a town or village does not have a functioning water supply then this is on the government. NGO's with deeper pockets have tried and failed.
Devs are Not the Gods Anymore
In Ireland back in the 60s the Catholic Church ruled the country and many in charge did bad things. Priests were considered above the law and anything said goes. So in the 90s the public got fed up of them and indirectly kicked them to the curb. I found at Steem and Hive after this that the devs were held in such high regard but yet progress used to be slow. I get it. No AI and a complicated platform in the backend took time.
Most of our top 20 witnesses are dev's and this is by design.
AI has come in and normal people with some knowledge of coding can design complex systems that are secure. Devs looking for thousands for a few commits here and there in a year on Hive are not going to survive in the real world any longer whether it is on another blockchain or our own. AI has coding cracked since Opus 4.5. Dev's cannnot be demanding hundreds of thousands anymore for a platform such as Hive blog which has the most basic styling with performance issues. The days of devs demanding huge sums for development should be over unless they are overhauling huge sections of the platform. Obviously the older devs have their backs up calling anything made by a non dev as AI slop. The new AI models can design a platform much better than any dev.
The AI subscription proposal should replace the dev proposal but seeing that the AI companies are making massive losses on subs , the pay per token models are coming in soon. They are already here with some models such as Fable and most AI API's so I'm thinking the Hive dev's will be applying for a few thousand for these AI subs as a substitute for the cushy funding they had for a few years on Hive.
But on the flipside of this , everyone on Hive is a dev and we all have our head down designing this and that, building this and that but nobody is using this and that because they are so busy with their own project. We now lack users to use our products. I can see a good few projects that have potential but just don't have the traffic on Hive and this is now the problem.
The Times they are changing. This is a pivotal time for Hive and things need to change or we are gonzo. We probably are already. For most of the leechers, they will close their laptop and go off about their business in the real world. For the base users it would be a bitter disappointment of what could have been and we will remember everyone who took at the wrong time. But in a centralised society whereever there is money there is corruption. In a decentralised society it is 10 times worse. It is the whole reason why we became centralised in the first place. Hive will become a really good use case for how a decentralised structure cannot work in society to a student studying social economics. Greed is just too prominent in todays world. And it is not just our blockchain. It is the entire crypto industry. We have gone backwards instead of forward. So much so that KYC is now everywhere you go in crypto which was the whole point of crypto in the first place to get away from it. The amount of people using crypto is dwindling as it eats itself with regulation. We are not early. We are too late.
