I’ve been here a long time, 9 years to be exact. Crazy, isn’t it?
I’ve watched legit hype and silly unwarranted hype. I’ve seen crazy dumps and crazy recoveries . I’ve seen con artists rob the chain and a lot of sincere people trying their best against all odds to build.
There’s a lot I love about the chain and a lot I don’t but I am still here and with good enough reason.
I have always valued one aspect of Hive above all others. I see it as a microcosm for society. It’s small enough that you can see how the pieces interact and how things really work. Not everything is transparent but there’s more transparency. There are incentives and people act according to those incentives and interestingly enough sometimes not in accordance with incentives because they have their own ideals and goals and personalities.
It’a an alternative to society in that it’s ruled by code first and foremost, but it’s comprised of people who are connected to the world so in many ways it behaves just as society does.
There are people you like and people you don’t like. There are scams and people who try to game the system. There are amazing people from all walks of life doing things the way they see fit. There are disagreements and people who want to keep the status quo and others who want to overturn the system.
Some things happen out in the open (on chain) and some things happen in secret (off chain).
I’ve thought about leaving two or three times before, mostly because I don’t agree with harshly downvoting people who aren’t explicitly and consistently trying to game the system and because at times I feel discouraged by how hard it is to build without a shared vision and without centralized leadership.
But I love taking part in the experiment even passively, and there are many things I disagree about nation states but I still use currency and public transportation and try to do what I can to make it better in whatever small way so I might as well do the same here, since I’m going to write and create no matter what and I always have a few people engaging with my posts.
There’s really no reason to leave.
Not only that, the lower the price gets and the more people leave, the greater my influence grows. It really is a fascinating phenomenon.
Of course there is a risk of becoming the king of the ashes of an extinct civilization, but I don’t believe it will ever get THAT bad, and my reason for that is this…
We are already in a pretty bad place and there is still so much life here. We are down 5 cents on the dollar. We’ve tried everything to onboard new people and keep them here and nothing really seems to have worked long enough to grow in numbers. Crypto in general has been exposed as 99% hype.
The Hive bubble has burst and I still see signs of life.
Of course we could go lower but at these prices and with this overall sentiment, that fact that so many people still come every day to write and interact is meaningful.
I have a policy that I write when I want to clarify my thoughts or share something, never because I want to get paid even if I want to get paid. To put it another way, I want to get paid but I don’t change my behavior in order to get paid. I just try to bring my best to what I do.
Social media has never been welcome of my long form writing, at least not when I’m regular about it. I need somewhere to share this stuff and it’s here or Substack and to be honest I feel way more at home here plus the earning potential at Substack is abysmal and it’s not the same kind of mini society, it’s just a different flavor of social media.
So I keep sharing here.
I didn’t expect people to still comment on my posts! I didn’t expect I’d be earning the same amount in dollar value as I was when HIVE was 4x higher.
It seems that sticking it out has helped secure my position on the platform as an influential member of the community. How influential I don’t know, but I finally achieved my goal of being consistently read and supported here.
Perhaps there is less noise and so people have less bullshit to wade through? Perhaps it’s just about time and commitment, the longer you go and the longer you do it your way, the more people come to know and trust you?
I don’t know.
It doesn’t feel like the best time to buy when we still don’t know how we will keep money and interest in Hive, when we’ve failed so much. Then there’s all the other hot investments right now, AI stocks and all that and the looming fears of a market crash.
But there’s one thing I can’t deny. All these years, we hyped up hive, and believe that $2 or $10 hive was actually possible. If we listened to our gut, we probably would’ve seen just how unlikely that was. It may have been possible, but we were David fighting a Goliath that didn’t even know we existed.
Hive was always overvalued. We just didn’t acknowledge it because all of crypto was overvalued. It was where all the risky investors came at once.
Now the risky investors have spread out throughout the economy and crypto is starting to inhabit a place that acknowledges its own shortcomings and the fact that the old system isn’t just going to keel over and die, that it will evolve and adapt and make room for us while forcing us to compromise in some ways.
For the very first time, Hive looks like a good deal.
I am not sure I’ll buy it, mostly because my work isn’t secure and I want to focus my energy on music and investing whatever I have in that, but I know if I had an extra $100,000 lying around, I would probably put $5000 into Hive and power up another 100k hive.
Maybe if something turns in my favor, if bitcoin pumps earlier than expected, if I find some extra work or if my music takes off… I think iI’d put 2/3 of it in gold so I have some exposure to it, then 1/3 into Hive.
I wouldn’t expect it to go to $1 but I’d hope for it to double or triple as I continued earning and be thrilled with a 4x by the time Bitcoin starts recovering again.
I’m not telling you to do this (not financial advise lol). I think hive should be treated as an extremely risky investment right now as I think anything other than gold or Bitcoin on a 2-4 year time frame should be.
The economy is such a shit show right now. We are always teetering between a Great Depression and new all time highs and the space between them seems to get smaller every day.
Jobs will continue disappearing and new resources keep appearing with fewer ways to build something sustainable.
It’s hard to say what will happen.
All I know is I’m going to suppress my urge to sell because despite all that’s happened, despite no clear road ahead or solution to our problems, Hive is still alive and kicking even as the price is at an all time low.
I hope that at least in continuing to earn hive that I can become even more influential on the platform and encourage the kinds of things I want to see here.
If we’ve made it this far, it would stand to reason that we will at least make it to the next Bitcoin rally where taking profits makes more sense.
Remember that when you see $1 payout when hive is at $0.05, you are earning 10x more hive than a $1 payout at $0.50 hive. This is when new whales are born.
I truly appreciate the support I’m getting here. I don’t take a $10 payout lightly in this market.
