Hive History

This is a reblog from my website. It's an attempt to get some referrals for InLeo. Hopefully the first of a series. See original post here.

It All Began As Steemit

Serial cryptocurrency entrepreneur Dan Larimer founded the Steem blockchain and Steemit, Inc. in mid 2016. The wikipedia article I’m using to source this has some date conflicts, but Steemit was up and running by July 4th 2016.

Ninja Mining

Dan had a vision to create a blockchainified version of Reddit. Dan succeeded. The problem with Dan Larimer is that he can’t seem to stick with any project for more than about a year or so. You may remember Dan Larimer from several overhyped largely failed projects that he started and then later abandoned such as: EOS, Voice, and Bitshares.

2017 Was Lit

Steemit benefited from the legendary Bitcoin bull run of 2017. There was a lot of interest in Steemit in those days. That was when I signed up!

Like many blockchains, Steemit saw a massive decrease in users with the great crypto bear market of 2018-2019. Before the rollercoaster even began in earnest, Dan got bored. Dan Larimer abandoned Steemit and left it in the hands of his capable co-founder Ned Scott in March 2017.

Ned Scott was the guy who had to make the tough decisions in the bear market. One of those tough decisions was laying off 70% of Steemit’s staff. I don’t envy him. So I have a little sympathy towards Ned surrounding what came next.

By the time the market started getting interesting again in 2020, anyone still regularly showing up on Steemit was a hard core fan. The people looking for quick bucks were long gone. And there were still 5 to 7 thousand daily active users on Steemit. This is what enabled one of the greatest peasant revolts in cryptocurrency history!

Betrayal and Revolt

The seeds of the revolution were planted during Steemit’s founding. STEEM started off as a mineable cryptocurrency. The founders weren’t upfront about the mining process however and once Steemit Inc. controlled about 80% of the available STEEM tokens, they shut off mining altogether and switched the STEEM blockchain to a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS) model. The technical term for this sort of ballyhoo is a “ninja-mine.” Once the Steemit users, especially the miners, found out about this, they were a little miffed.

Their fears were assuaged as Steemit Inc. promised them that the ninja-mined tokens would only be used for good, and never evil. That was true until Tron’s very own Justin Sun came walking in circa 2020.

Compared to web2 giants like Twitter and Facebook, Steemit was nothing really. But compared to other blockchains and crypto centered apps, Steemit had a large, active, and dedicated community. Justin Sun wanted some of that action for his Tron network.
So Justin started wheelin and dealin with Ned to purchase the ninja mined STEEM tokens which would give him (Justin) control of the network. He planned to eventually move it to the Tron network and benefit off the users.

They announced the deal on February 14th 2020. Some of the Steem witnesses didn’t like the idea of being rolled into Tron. They knew they were being railroaded and they fought back. The rebel witnesses got enough Steem Power together to push through a soft fork that eliminated the voting power of the ninja mined stake. Justin still owned the majority of tokens, but now his tokens didn’t give him any voting power. Oh, and they also froze Justin’s tokens so he couldn’t move them.

Steem is governed by elected witnesses. Anyone with some Steem Power tokens can vote for some witnesses to represent them, then the top 20 witnesses get to govern the Steem blockchain.

On the surface, Justin Sun tried to appear diplomatic and friendly. Behind the scenes though, he was pushing on his friends who owned centralized exchanges and getting them to use their customers Steem tokens to vote for Sun aligned witnesses who could undo the rebellion. Sun owned Poloniex but he also got use of the tokens held by Huobi and Binance to conduct his counter insurgency. On March 2nd 2020 Justin Sun, using tokens that weren’t even his, regained full control of the Steem blockchain. He’d won. Sort of.

The Birth of Hive

One long time Steemian, who would not be ruled by Justin Sun, was named Dan Hensley. This tall dark and handsome crypto millionaire wasn’t going to just sit around and take it. He started making moves. Dan organized a bunch of Steemians, including some big boys from Splinterlands to launch a second intifada against Justin Sun.

The fight went back and forth through March 2020. I seem to remember some other big news events going on in March 2020 so it was easy for some people to not have noticed what was happening on Steemit. However the rebels lost in the end. Again.

The people who weren’t about to move to Tron had one last act of rebellion to try. Having lost the civil war, they opted for secession. On March 20th 2020 the Hive blockchain went live. It was a fork of Steemit and it had no ninja mined stake. It was going to be everything Steemit had failed to be.

The launch of Hive made me some good money. It made a lot of people some good money. Anyone who had STEEM tokens, suddenly had an equal number of HIVE tokens. I immediately sold my STEEM tokens and bought more HIVE tokens with the proceeds. It was a good move.

As I said above, there were some other world events going on in the Spring and Summer of 2020 so not everyone abandoned Steemit right away. With the passage of time, and the increasingly shady dealings of Justin Sun though, more and more people left Steemit and moved to Hive. The biggest blow to Steemit was when Splinterlands took their massive amount of users and moved over to Hive. I hear there are still some people on Steemit, but I wouldn’t know anything about that. I’m all on board for Hive.

This whole drama of Steemit vs Hive is incredible and I’ve just hit the high points. Read this article here for more juicy details.

It’s A Beautiful Thing

Here is my personal take on the Steemit vs Hive war and its consequences almost four years later.

Objectively, Steem and Hive have similar stats. As of this writing STEEM tokens are trading for $0.25 while HIVE tokens are trading for $0.33. They both have similar market caps with STEEM at $115,000,000 and HIVE at $141,000,000. Thanks CoinGecko for the data!

That said, the Hive community is MUCH more vibrant. Aside from the Reddit style blogging, Hive has all sorts of Dapps (Decentralized Applications). Hive has several games now with the far and away leader being Splinterlands. Hive has Twitter competitors called InLeo and DBuzz. There is a YouTube competitor called 3Speak. There is a Facebook style interface called PeakD. There are DeFi (Decentralized Finance), savings, and stablecoin options with the Hive Backed Dollar (HBD), and Hive Engine. I’m going to write more about each of these interesting dapps in later posts.

The Hive community is small but vibrant. There are niche communities for finance, gaming, gardening, and travel. There are also regional communities based around Venezuela, the Philippines, Cuba, Nigeria, and Ghana.

Hive has been slowly and steadily adding users the past four years. People tend to drop off in bear markets, but year over year there are more and more people using Hive. There is tremendous potential for growth.

A few people are able to make a pretty good living by posting quality content every day. All of us make a little extra side money just by doing the things most people do on Twitter and YouTube every day for no compensation. It’s fun and you’re guaranteed to make a little bit of money. If you really get into it, work hard, be consistent, and gain a following you can make some real money.