The rewards pool on Hive has always been a hotly debated and contested component of the blockchain and remains very important today. However, I think the meaning of it has been changing quite a lot since I first started here almost five years ago - though, some people seem not to understand this.
The rewards pool is a very cool way of creating widening distribution of the HIVE token, a sit allows anyone with a brain (proof-of-brain remember) to earn it. However, as I have always said, this earning (in my opinion) is not a salary, it is an opportunity to own the network. Some people took this opportunity to stake in, some people didn't.
Owning a piece of the network is again in my opinion, very important, as not only does it give account access and protection, it also provides a network of protection for all other accounts so that even if they are low to no stake, they are able to utilize the network at some level. There are many ways to look at this, but for an example, most of the current transactions on Hive are derived from Splinterlands and without stake, they are unable to do what they do, which is delegate a little HP to all new accounts to use so that they can interact with the blockchain, for example, to submit a team to battle. They don't actually need HP though, they need another token, Resource Credits.
Resource Credits are created only from powered up Hive and all transactions on the blockchain require some. For example, voting doesn't take much, posting takes more. This is the "cost" to write to the blockchain and it is one of the reasons we aren't inundated with spam.
Currently though, Resource Credits can't be delegated, but 
Continuing with Splinterlands as the example, it means that instead of delegating HP (something that can draw on the Hive rewards pool for earning), they can delegate RCs to new accounts, granting them access to the game and the community, but not direct earning ability. This might not seem like a big deal perhaps, but with the rate they are creating accounts at the moment, it is.
Oh. HP also grants the ability (if someone has enough staked) to claim "free" accounts, trading RCs for an account creation token. Accounts take about 3 HIVE to create, which means account creation capabilities have a value on them too. I have claimed over the last few years almost 5000 account tokens, which means I can create 5000 accounts for people for free. I don't know that many people, but I can do the company I work for 10 times over, which I think in the future will have value.
Or, there will be a delegation of account tokens possible, which means all of my accounts could go into an account liquidity pool and whenever an application needs one, they pay something in and that value is distributed across the pool by share, or something of the sort. This also can work in combination with an RC delegation pool, so each new account comes paired with RCs. Anyway, my point is, there are many options in this regard and in the future, there will be very real values being generated.
However, there are still many people who see the rewards pool as an income creators, without acknowledging all of the other possibilities. For example and again using Splinterlands, back in the day before people were earning much on the game itself, many people were creating content based o the game (they still are) and were rewarded by HIVE stakeholders who wanted to support the game. This was added incentive to play, invest in and spread the word and it leveraged the Hive reward pool to empower it. Yes, they are content creators too, but the real power of using the pool in this way was to support the growth of the application.
And I think that this is what a lot of people are missing still in regards to Hive in general as they focus on only the rewards pool - Hive is an application ecosystem and the value of the blockchain was, is and will increasingly be its ability to enable applications to build value as independent experiences. The rewards pool is there to enable this growth in many ways, either through providing direct vote reward, RCs, accounts, supporting witness development, voting on the Hive Development Fund proposals and a hundred other things along the way.
What I have found is that often, the people who are complaining the most about reward distribution, don't actually know much about Hive itself, other than the rewards pool. These can be people who have been here for a long time already and may have even earned a fair bit, but chose not to become significant owners or, grow as Hive grew, which is why they still focus solely on the rewards pool.
While Hive started with blogging as the distribution mechanism, it was always intended to expand from there into a far wider set of applications. It is the stakeholders who underpin the network so that they are able to build with relative stability and, do it cheaply without transaction fees, plus, get support for their early steps. After almost six years of distribution, it is pretty well spread, with some very large stakeholders and even some very large who bought in from scratch too at quite high prices - as well as lots of largish, medium sized and small accounts. While all can draw on the rewards pool relative to their stake, that is not the only reason to have stake.
There were a couple interesting comments on my post today about buying Splinterlands Vouchers and Packs, where people thanked me for "selling Hive" as I required Hive to buy the vouchers. I bought so many I pushed the price up, so some people earned a bit more Hive today and one at least said "thanks, it allowed me to power a bit more Hive up". I think this is pretty cool. Interestingly though is, while I did spend the Hive on vouchers, I didn't actually use my Hive for it, I bought it from an exchange. That means it took a very little liquidity off the open markets and some people who were able to earn Vouchers in SPS could sell and earn some Hive. Now they have a choice, do they want to own a little more of the network, or transfer into something else. A few will power up, some will on-sell by buying something off Hive, some will buy other Hive application assets too. All good.
As said, the rewards pool is changing a lot in usecase, as it is no longer the only way to earn on Hive. This doesn't make it less important, it makes it more important, as rather than being a blogging site with the potential to earn on content, it is an application ecosystem with hundreds of possibilities for earning potential. The people who are focusing solely on the rewards pool and complaining about distribution, seem to have missed the memo that the world is changing on and off of Hive and, Hive is part of that change, as well as affected by it.
Back in the days of 2018 and people laughing at me for holding while they sold at the earlier highs, I knew I was still in the better position. The reason is that once people sell for "easy money", they tend not to make great investment decisions. This is why the people from back then are still focusing on and complaining about the rewards pool, because it was their tap to fiat. Yet other people were doing their research, taking some risks, building their foundation and staying abreast of the developing crypto industry, which means now, they are earning in a multitude of streams, Hive being one of them.
Earning rewards through content on Hive is still a massively important part of Hive, but the value of the content is really based on how it supports Hive to grow in some way, including how it supports its applications to grow too. This doesn't mean that other blogging content isn't important, but the internet is full of content, so what makes it special to have it here? Exclusivity is one aspect, which is why I only post on Hive. But one pretty important thing is, most Hive content can only be found on Hive.
This might all seem "inward facing" and it predominantly was, but as more applications attract users in and are able to reward them for application-based content, those users become Hive users and then, they start to explore the greater ecosystem. Hive becomes a highly complex ecosystem of many layers and pathways for individual users, who are able to explore a growing and changing world that is pushing the boundaries of socially-powered crypto interaction. They might be able to earn a living wage on Hive, without earning a single HIVE through their content and still see the value in buying a few so as to keep roaming and owning the changing landscape.
The rewards pool is immensely valuable and as more applications come on and more users sign-in, the other aspects of the rewards pool become increasingly important too, including Resource Credits and account creation. These things are scarce and will have increasing value, which means that in time, the liquid stake that is currently floating on exchanges will be looking to come back onto Hive in order to earn on the many other channels of possibility - which creates market scarcity, setting up any value tensions and those with HP, will have access to far more value than the rewards pool alone.
I feel that often, people get caught up in the small, short-term gains and miss the log-term large profits. We all make decisions based on what we believe and know and there are some people who haven't seemed to have learned much, no matter how long they have been around. They still act as they believe though.
Hive is many things to many people and everyone can have a different opinion about what it should be, but that doesn't stop it being what it is. And what it is, is always changing.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
