What does HIVE mean to me? — Building Bridges

This post is a response to @theycallmedan's "What does HIVE mean to me?" initiative. In it, he posed the following questions—What is HIVE to you? What do you want to see HIVE evolve into? What do you think about having a large funded DAO for future HIVE development? What does HIVE mean to you? My response can be summed up by the phrase "building bridges," and I hope to expand upon that in this post.

What is HIVE?

For me, HIVE is potentially a path towards what STEEM was originally intended to be. From the very start of STEEM there were shady dealings, poor communication lines, and mistrust between community members and the Steemit, Inc. team. In addition to this you had the original lead blockchain engineer Dan Larimer leaving to create EOS, long periods of time in which misaligned economic incentives thrived (i.e. the long reign of bidbots and vote-buying, which mainly enriched large accounts further and made true metrics of virality impossible), Steemit, Inc.'s mismanagement of funds leading to 70% of employees being laid off during the last bear market, Ned Scott's subsequent questionable sale to Justin Sun, etc. — it all adds up to a rather bleak picture.

Yet throughout all this, a small, continually-rotating core community continued to fuel the underlying development, creativity, philanthropy, and community spirit of the place. While it is true that not all will migrate over to Hive from Steem in the beginning, as the chains diverge and take different developmental paths it will eventually be clear which offers the superior value proposition. My bet is on Hive. Despite baggage and remaining game-theory problems with dPOS, including an innate tendency towards oligarchic centralization of witnesses, I would argue that we are attempting to build a bridge here in good faith towards the ideal of wide distribution of funds, available to meet the needs of a huge number of individuals on a global scale.

What I would like to see HIVE evolve into

First and foremost—we must expand into a large and thriving user base! We need to be focusing on on-boarding new users, both those educated about cryptocurrency and those completely new to the space. Their fresh energy and perspectives will play nicely with seasoned veterans, and they will enjoy being a part of a new beginning here. It is vital that from day one we are brainstorming how to modify the existing economic incentives/structures including witness voting, proposal voting, powerdown length, inflation amount, refinement of HBD, testing rewards curves, etc. If we fall into the same stagnation of a few powerful witnesses steering the ship, it will not be good for anyone, including those witnesses, in the long term. Many different voices must be heard, and many capable hands given the opportunity to steer the ship.


Decaying witness votes are necessary to combat this stagnation, hopefully combined with witness term limits. In this case, one could continually be a witness, but would have to re-campaign on a second account when time expires, at the very least re-campaigning for support. Decaying votes are also helpful in the edge case of people passing away and having their votes remain on old witnesses potentially forever. I have immense respect and gratitude for witnesses and many don't realize how intensive their work often is behind the scenes, yet we also have a proposal system through the DAO that allows backup witnesses to earn in alternative ways while they are in cooldown from the top slots. Additional pressure to provide proof of contribution is overall positive for the chain, and I would hope it would cause witnesses to evolve into teams rather than individuals in the future, when the token value is substantially higher and this is more viable. That way, a witness could have someone responsible for code, someone responsible for communication, etc.


From witnesses I expect to see a long-term, abundance-based vision of what the ecosystem can become. That will sometimes require them to pass approval on code changes that do not directly benefit their positions of power; indeed, that may directly weaken them. For those cynical that believe human beings are only selfish animals, I urge you to study the numerous examples throughout our history of the nobility of the human spirit displayed by remarkable individuals with powerful vision. Principles that are deeply held must supercede survival concerns to pave a path towards a future, flourishing ecosystem. The community will always look after its own, so we can make decisions from courage, not from fear. We can focus on building and expanding the reach of our branches, knowing our roots go deep.

My take on the HIVE DAO

I am extremely optimistic about the potential of a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) to fuel development. The encoding of explicit rules for access to funds is an excellent safeguard against abuse, since only proposals approved by a large enough total stake will be paid out in a secure manner. I have already commented above about how I believe the DAO can be used by giving witnesses and developers an alternative manner to be paid while they are on cooldown from term limits, should those be implemented.


Some concerns about the DAO are related to oligarchic centralization caused by dPOS game-theory peculiarities. Some would argue this is not a flaw, but an intent of dPOS' design, as true democracy can be shown to be not particularly functional outside a small, local community by studying history. Despite the buzzword "decentralization," power tends to gather, not only for sinister reasons, but also because only a small minority of individuals are willing to take upon themselves great responsibility required to wield great influence. We can mitigate, but never revoke this law, which is part of the natural operation of the universe.


Determining a "fair" payout for any given project can also be difficult as it relies on trust or belief of voters that the proposal is doing what it claims to be doing, not exaggerating the workload to get a free ride. Again we have voter apathy, and the question of whether we can provide additional incentives for stakeholders to be actively engaged in voting proposals. We also need a much larger core community that is educated and continually thinking about priorities in development so the fund is not squandered away to peripheral projects that neglect the most important things needed for mass adoption.

What does HIVE mean to me?

HIVE really means more than I can express. I was recently reminiscing with one of my good friends about the amazing period in 2017-2018 on STEEM in which we were both able to earn enough to justify creating content full time. During that time I was able to start a huge poetry initiative and support people from many places around the world. I was also able to have the time and energy to devote to coming into my own artistically. Once the bear market came, my dream of being able to help so many people directly seemed to be totally shattered. Yet the seed of that dream-vine lives on.


We are coming from an old paradigm of fear, greed, and hoarding into a transitionary phase in which I hope blockchain can play a central role in moving towards the shared realization that we are all rich by virtue of our very existence. Nowhere is there too little of anything; here and now we have the tools and resources that we need for all humanity to thrive, if we will only construct bridges over the waters of isolation to the islands where undiscovered genius lies in undiscovered minds.


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What are your answers to the following questions?
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1 — What is HIVE?
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2 — What would you like HIVE to evolve into?
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3 — What is your take on decentralized funding through a HIVE DAO?
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4 — What does HIVE mean to you personally?
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Comment below, or add a post link to your response to this initiative.
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A special thank you to @theycallmedan for sparking this discussion!
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Yours,

@d-pend