Normally I write a post every time I acquire 1000 more account tokens on Hive. I talk about the importance of bandwidth on Hive. Sometimes I talk about Sybil attack or potential reputations systems... it takes about 6 months to acquire 1000 account tokens (5-7 accounts per day) at my current level of stake. However I didn't write a post at 8000 or 9000 because it seemed like it was getting a bit stale.
I have now officially hit the mythical five-figure unit-bias mark. Hurray for me! I live in a small town and theoretically I have enough tokens to make a Hive account for every single person that resides here. Kind of crazy when I think about it. Of course providing them with the RCs to actually use the chain might be another story. Although I do think under the current conditions I'd probably be able to swing it (especially if I could get some of them to buy in on their own)
It's a little hard to imagine RCs being hard to get, but if the chain gets adoption (or even just filled up with spam) it could become quite expensive to keep transactions free, if that makes sense. Already writing posts to the chain seems to cost 3x more than it did the last time I checked. Not that anyone notices these things because more often than not having like $20 worth of Hive powered up is normally enough to whatever you want here.
But imagine if Hive went x100 and RC cost went x5. All of a sudden it costs $10000 to farm the same amount of bandwidth on the chain. That could be a pretty big problem. Many chains out there have become a victim of their own success and failed to scale quickly enough to accommodate demand.
This has been a very hard problem to pose to users who have been here for a while because almost no one is going to see price going up x100 as a bad thing. Well.. it is. It's very bad unless we can sustain that price... which we obviously can't. And then all our new users lose everything and swear off crypto forever like a drunk girl throwing up in the toilet telling everyone they're "never going to drink again". Sure you're not. See you next cycle when you buy the top yet again.
I often repeat that our maximum blocksize is currently 22KB per second. That's actually not much better than Bitcoin believe it or not. That's about 13.5M every 10 minutes... max. I've been challenged on this idea several times with the blind retort that we can "just increase the blocksize". We cannot. We've seen what happens to the network when we max out on the current blocksize; shit starts breaking. To say we can effortlessly increase it by multiple factors without growing pains is a thoughtless fantasy.
Of course I will say that being paid to run a node on Hive does make it easier to scale up in theory. Rising cost of running infrastructure isn't going to sting if the token price goes up more. This is something that Bitcoin simply can't do as only the miners get paid and everyone else just has to figure something out.
The vast majority of people on this chain seem to think that Hive is all about social media. I definitely don't see it that way. What I see is a blockchain that happens to have social media on it. It's a single app. Arguably it's an important one but I've always imagined it would never be our more profitable one in the end.
Assuming we do run out of bandwidth at some point and there are a lot of users who want to use the chain but can't afford HP... how much would they be willing to pay for RC delegations? A common retort to this thought experiment is the classic: "well the apps will have to provide the RCs for their users to maintain the illusion of free service". Hm, yes... but that only goes so far. It's quite easy to attack an RC pool with bots if those RCs are actually worth something, just like it was easy to attack HP delegations even though it was only 10 HP per account. Well actually they started at 30 HP and then 20 HP and then 10 HP specifically because of these attacks on bandwidth providers.
A baseline value we can look at in terms of value of RCs is the cost to mint an account. For example my account has access to 455,850 billion RCs right now. All of that regenerates every 5 days. It might cost something like 3B to post a comment to the chain. Lately I've been able to claim something like 40 account tokens with max RCs, implying the cost of an account could be something like 11,396B RC... which would maybe be able to post something like 4000 comments. Doing extreme napkin math here as the exact numbers don't really matter.
So what's worth more? An account token (3 Hive), or 4000 posts worth of RCs? Definitely depends on the situation but I imagine if RCs were actually valuable enough to charge for delegations users might be willing to pay a pretty decent premium compared to the account token cost. I could imagine an account like mine going from claiming account tokens to renting out RC delegations and earning like... perhaps something like 100 Hive a day if I was lucky. And hopefully I'd be able to provide like 1000 daily active users with enough bandwidth to be doing whatever they wanted to do on chain... could be wishful thinking though considering the cost of operations can increase.
Uh yeah but it's exactly the economic system we have. Far too many people here think if we go mainstream then everyone is going to be buying their own Hive and farming their own RCs. Why would they though? If Hive is expensive and RCs are cheap and the RCs can be converted into other assets worth more than the RCs they bought... that's a circular economy. It will work. Everyone will get what they want; supply and demand. I don't really see any way around it to be honest.
On top of my 10,000 account tokens I also claimed many hundreds of accounts over the years because I view the namespace on Hive to be prime real-estate. I have also equated the public namespace on Hive with NFTs that have actual utility. Whether this becomes true or not certainly depends on our adoption levels going forward... and eventually I'll need a way to sell or rent them out if they're ever in demand.
But what I really wanted to say is that I went back and looked and some of the accounts I sniped I don't remember them being so so terrible 😜. I must have been smoking the drugs back in 2021 when I minted a lot of these. If worst comes to worst I always have a fun botnet I can play with... but also it would be interesting if outsiders could access bot accounts without having to sign up. Like they find a blog randomly on PeakD or whatever and can post a comment using the bot without having to sign in. Could be useful functionality (or a flop that gets Sybil attacked).
Well I think I've rambled enough. Hive has struggled deeply over this last cycle but I'm still ever the permabull. We have an interesting system here that we still don't fully know how it works under duress. Bandwidth is precious, but because it is abundant at the moment many do not realize it just how valuable it is.
