Here I am just staring at the keys in the picture, with three ideas to write, but an inability to make a definitive decision on which path to follow to see where it leads. Lately, a lot of my thoughts have been turning toward the market side of things, which is pretty stereotypical when Bitcoin is looking to breach 30K - and I don't have that much of it. It is more lamentation of the past in some way, or perhaps, the realization that was put well by someone I was chatting with a while ago, that the people who are continually selling HIVE are doing better than the people who are giving them the votes. A bit of irony.
It is a funny thing really, where those who benefit are possibly the least supportive of the community, while those who hold and support get the honor of propping up the price by keeping stake. But to bring the picture into it, we play the keys we do and the song doesn't always come out that pretty. As a holder, I still find it weird that I am one of the largest accounts, since so many people who sold should have been able to buy back far more than I hold.
As I mentioned a couple days ago one BTC would buy 227,000 HIVE - which is now 250,000 Hive. This means that at the HIVE all time high - selling about 10000 HIVE into BTC and holding it to buy back today, would have equated to 250K HIVE.
Many sold, yet I don't see that many of them buying back in now, which is also quite normal. Selling is easier than buying as selling comes with the reward of something usable in life, buying is locking what is usable up and potentially risking it - and the opportunity cost of what else can be done with that value. An additional problem with Hive is that many people didn't actually buy it at all, they earned it through participation.
The problem isn't this directly, it is that there is the sense that it is kind of "free" and free is worth less than what required investment. At least for many. I still think that eventually though, the balance shifts into the long-term view where the earning of Hive is far harder than it is today and what came easily before, is far harder to earn.
In many ways, this works like increasing the mining difficulty on a token, making the same effort put in less effective. Factor in the uncertainty in things like whether token inflation through the pool will be changed by consensus one day, and what was flowing can dry up very fast. I see that eventually, the HIVE pool won't be distributing very widely at all and the holders that are holders will be the holders who will be holders. The secondary tokens will take precedence as earners, HIVE becomes the enabler and stability of the infrastructure.
I have always looked long on Hive, which is why I have consistently powered up to increase my stake so that one day I can secure the network, among a community invested in enabling and facilitating the growth of the community. I don't know what that is worth of there were a thousand successful second-layer applications and 50 million users on Hive - but I suspect that there would be some value to be found somewhere - and it wouldn't be through advertising.
As I have said before, I think that investing into HIVE is like investing into an index of independent companies that are all striving to be successful. While many will fail, many will survive, some thrive and a few will make very large impacts on the markets, with one or two potentially disrupting industries. Each will hold a value as a "single" entity, but the entire mass of all singles will be collected on the one chain. While users of a second-layer application needn't know or care about Hive, the application itself will be interested in things like performance, costs and and scalability.
Not only this, he also mentioned that 33% of the pool would go to witnesses, which again might be fine, if it went to far more witnesses than the consensus top 20, but this creates its own problems. Since even though 33% is 3x more than they get now, 1% inflation would make the pool 1/8th or so of the size - making it a percentage increase, but a token paycut. Short term and until the reduction in inflation made an impact on price, how many witnesses will want to keep a node up?
However, if that 33% went out to more witnesses, it could be possible to have the applications themselves run Hive nodes and take a portion of the reward for not only securing their own application, but adding power to the entire ecosystem. This way, an application could somewhat offset the cost of their infrastructure, whilst simultaneously benefiting others. Some applications already run witnesses, but I am not sure how many run a full node. I think though, it would be beneficial for more applications to run their own nodes and using the inflation pool to incentivize this might be useful. I haven't thought about the governance of this though.
But, if this reduction in inflation to 1% happened tomorrow (I don't think this will happen anytime soon, but this is crypto) about 15 years ahead of its "natural" time (it reduces yearly by 0.5% over a year), that would mean that the people who sold today, would find it at least 8x more difficult to get their stake back in the same way, in a market where holding becomes more attractive due to scarcity and perhaps even, an increase in competition, as it started to affect price. The problem is, this is all price dependent, as if the value of the token stays pretty much where it is, what has been the point of the exercise? It would make it 8 times harder to play the game for the same monetary reward - and people think it is hard now.
Now, as I said at the beginning, I had three pathways I could have taken, but it seems that there was a fourth in the mix too, as I wasn't going to write about any of these thoughts at all tonight. And they are just that, partially developed thoughts - me tapping around at my mental keys to see what kinds of tunes form. The possibilities of directions Hive can go is near endless as it is a decentralized marketplace of participants that can each forge their own path, making what will actually happen largely a guessing game, made even more difficult as it sits in a highly volatile and rapidly changing new industry.
It could be that it is this uncertainty that keeps me powered up as while I miss out on the short gains, I have the FOMO of missing out on the rest of the future. I should of course take some kind of middle-ground approach to it all, but I haven't been very good at that so far. Perhaps on the next pump - or perhaps I will just power more up and hope for the pendulum to swing my way.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]