I was scanning through Seth Godin's blog when I saw a recent post on the blockchain called Why the Blockchain Matters. It's a good layman's explanation of what Bitcoin and a blockchain is with some practical examples. It also does a good job of dispelling some of the myths around cryptos so all in all it is worth a read.
But there's a part of his analysis that is fascinating.
In it Seth talks about Wikipedia and how it was built by tens of thousands of people devoting millions of hours to compiling this database for free.
He goes on to say (I'll include the whole extract, as it is so important and sounds as if he is describing Hive itself - see what you think):
Now imagine a blockchain/token project in which contributors earned tokens as they built it and supported it.
Over time, the decentralized project would go up in value. As the ecosystem and the market delivered more and more utility to more and more people, the users would need to buy tokens to use it. And the holders of tokens would receive either a dividend or have the ability to sell their tokens if they chose.
Early speculators would attract more attention, and people with more skill than capital could invest by contributing early and often.
As the project reached a steady state, the stakeholders would shift, from innovators and speculators to people who treat their daily contributions as a job without a boss. Innovators could build on top of this network without permission, creating more and more variations and choice using the same underlying database.
Stunning.
And if the King of Blogging was to find Hive, well that would be something...
