Now there's a movie you probably don't want to watch more than once. A depressing and harrowing tale of unbridled capitalism and greed; profits above all else. Humanity need not apply.
On a certain level we all identify with this mindset, making it all the more disturbing. Maximize gains... make the most money possible at any cost, amirite?
The problem with this mindset is that it is one based in scarcity. No matter how much we have, it is never enough. The grass is always greener on the other side. Gratitude is in short supply. A toxic mindset to be sure.
How old is Hive? Is it nine months old, or is it 5 years old?
The branding is only nine months old but the chain data goes back 5 years. The coin distribution goes back 5 years, but then we "airdropped" a bunch of accounts that didn't want to be a part of the "new network", making the coin distribution both 5 years and 1 year old. Pretty weird.
Hive has suffered numerous crippling defeats in the last 3 years. Our leadership was trash. The CEO of our main dev team was a man-baby who couldn't make a correct decision to save his life, let alone stick to any decision made.
With all the opportunity in the world to provide liquidity during the bull market and buy a decade's worth of runway, instead that CEO decided it was a better idea to double down and hope the price would just continue up indefinitely. Amazing business strategy 101: how to not hedge your bets and take completely unnecessary risks for no reason.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the price of Steem should have never even hit $4. If Steemit Inc had simply sold the absolutely free ninja-mined coins they obtained for zero cost, the price would have never tumbled into oblivion. Our centralized guardian sucked at gambling and hedging bets... simple as that.
If I'm being honest, I'm personally somewhat enjoying how it all turned out now that all that garbage is behind us. But is it really? The mistakes of the past have a way of modifying the future.
It's no secret that Hive price has been staying flat while Bitcoin has damn near gone x3. Hive/USD is near all time lows while Bitcoin seems to make a new all time high every other day. It's depressing!
Another part of me is grateful that Hive price is so low. I look at my other mooning assets and think: wow now I could trade them back into Hive and greatly increase my influence on the network that I actually want influence on. What a "discount".
But that's not what people want to hear for the 1000th time, is it? No one wants to hear over and over again that "Hey, maybe this time is the right time to buy Hive." after they just got burned a dozen times before.
So we turn our backs on Hive, curse its name like a bad addiction because we just hit rock-bottom, and perhaps powerdown and move to greener pastures... Not me of course, because I'm a glutton for punishment, but many other people here do it all the time.
Which is funny and ironic... because while many of those players have less Hive stake and talk all kinds of trash about Hive and whatnot... They're still here talking about it... interacting with people... upkeeping their social networks... getting upvotes...
What better place to hate on Hive than on Hive itself?
And then there are those who forsake Hive but proceed to go on to make grand claims on some token built on top of the Hive blockchain. Sure, 99% of the time that token is LEO because no other HiveEngine tokens have even been remotely as successful, but that will change soon enough.
The point is you can't be bullish on a Hive token without also being bullish on Hive itself... just like you can't be bullish on an ERC-20 token or DeFi without also being bullish on Ethereum. Yet during the ICO craze... that's exactly what we saw: thousands of users bullish on shitcoin ICOs thinking that Ethereum would be completely pointless within a year or two. Remind me of what happened then.
In response to this logic many are saying things like, "Well, I'm bullish on Hive's technology... I'm just not bullish on the token-price and the tokenomics..."
Now, this makes me giggle for a number of reasons, the most obvious one being the painful similarity of:
Do you remember when people used to say this? Corporations used to say it as they created garbage closed-source enterprise blockchains that will never ever get off the ground (just like extranets and intranets). And what about all those central banks building those garbage CBDCs that are almost indistinguishable from fiat? Yeah, they also love the blockchain not Bitcoin mantra.
Seriously though, go back and look at the history of what people were saying about closed off quarantined systems being all the rage. It's embarrassing, and all those people get very quiet when proven wrong and hope no one will remember or bring it up. The value of the Internet was, and still is, communication and collaboration... not ownership.
Now, nobody is saying it, and it's been so long since I've heard it I'm actually kind of surprised I remembered to throw in for comparison. Because when it really comes down to it, the people who said "blockchain not Bitcoin" a few years back didn't actually believe that garbage... they simply wanted other people to believe it. They wanted to build something that they controlled so they could corner the market and suck down all the gains for themselves, just like the tools that thought extranets and intranets were an "amazing" idea.
Saying you believe in the Hive platform but not the tokenomics is pretty much the same as saying blockchain not Bitcoin. You want to take the Hive tech (blockchain) and build something on top of it that you control and then say the underlying currency is garbage? Sorry, you can't do that. That's not how this works.
As Andreas Antonopoulos explains in grievous detail, trying to separate the technology from the underlying value proposition is impossible. Without Bitcoin, blockchain is a worthless and heinously inefficient database that doesn't do anything. Much to the dismay of centralized powerhouses, the ability to decentralize their own corrupt power structures is the only thing breathing life into this unicorn asset.
We should ask ourselves: are we living in abundance?
99% of the time the answer is going to be: false.
We need to stop ourselves from falling into a trap of thinking a certain way because the investments we've made at such and such time aren't working out at the moment. This is why the best investment one can ever make is in their own education. That's an investment that doesn't get taken away or diminish in value.
The point of this post was supposed to be a speculative fluff piece on where the price action is headed over the next couple months... I obviously got a bit side tracked... if you can't tell by the pictures I used and the title let me give a hint: there will be blood.
