Let's Talk Straight about Hive

Some ramblings

I was on my bed, thinking about things that I am going to talk about in this post. But also as I couldn't sleep and got up, I saw the post series by Hive account@chiren. Those are also good reads, and while we share some sentiments, I am going to a different direction with my post.

You might agree or disagree with this post, but I am sure you will come out from reading this post with different perspectives on Hive.

Reward Pool

Let's get straight to it, Hive pays for everything with inflation and majority of this inflation is allocated to the reward pool. As the wisdom of yesteryear will tell you, this is supposed to be a way to spread Hive stake around.

In reality, reward pool is currently the biggest failure of Hive. Some people will disagree with this, they will tell you the reward pool is a good thing, it brings people to Hive.

Sure, it does bring people to Hive and it is also biggest reason for people to leave Hive. Disagreements on which content should be rewarded, who is scamming the blockchain, or fuck this guy in particular. It doesn't matter the reason, it causes people to leave.

Rewarding content might have been a big advantage of the Hive in the past, but in current social media paradigm, it is no longer a unique feature. Hell, Hive's model could be one of the worst ways to monetize social media content. When you can earn from your content as long as someone sees it, why limit yourself to a 7 day window after which you almost certainly earn nothing from it.

And spreading stake around is another massive failure. More accounts have a KE ratio of > 1 than people that have a KE ratio of < 1. For every account that have a KE < 1 ratio, there are 2 accounts that have a KE > 1 and this is for active accounts. If we include inactive accounts, I am pretty sure that number will climb even higher. Even the screenshot from hive.io is a way to prove this, there are more liquid Hive than staked Hive. If stake was spread around you would expect this to be inverse.

We can further expand why it is failure, even whales are voting Hive account@buildawhale burn comments or Hive account@hbdstabilizer posts/comments. These votes are actively preventing spread of the stake because they know if they don't vote these post they will get diluted. They know if they don't vote, rewards for other posts which they don't want to get rewarded will increase. Correct me, if I am wrong. But I am going to call out, what I see. (For the record, there is nothing wrong with them doing this. This is their right as stakeholders. I am writing this to illustrate the failure of the reward pool.)

DHF / HBD

There is nothing to say about it, other than what a waste of resources that it has been. But it is also good to see that people are becoming more prudent about DHF.

But I also seen some comments on HBD APR. Current price problems of Hive does not come from HBD APR. You can argue it is coming from HBD, but that is due to 50% liquid rewards we are giving to every post/comment in HBD. This is the HBD that gets sold, and converted by hbdstabilizer not the HBD in the savings. At some point we should cut APR, but it is certainly not this time when you do not want a flight of capital to hammer the price of Hive even more.

Solutions

We need a decentralized ad network for Hive, that would generate revenue and distribute to the posts/comments and frontends that earn views and phase out the reward pool this could be done incrementally. I know this is not an easy task but this is precisely a sort of task for DHF.

Inflation that were going to reward pool then can be either eliminated completely or redirected to holding staked hive.

We can put a conversion fee on the both sides of the conversion mechanism. Currently it is just HIVE -> HBD. This is what tether does, if you want to redeem USDT to USD, you pay fees. But for this we would also need to reduce the conversion fees. It is too steep at 5%. A 1% fee both ways would be more sensible.

Feel free to tell me how stupid I am to suggest these things, if you feel like it. Thanks for reading. :pained_laugh: