I do enjoy seeing HIVE move up in price - it also jumped about 80 positions on the movement to be currently ranked at #158. I don't know if it has to do with the win as the most innovative crypto product award, but regardless, it is all good news. The best part is seeing the excitement on chain, where there is a kind of electricity coursing through the community. Price is a terrible indicator of how well a project is performing or growing, but people definitely react to it. Even after seeing this several times in the past, it is always a good feeling.
Just two days ago I wrote a post about this time of year back in 2017 and at how fast price can move, and that was when HIVE was around 35 cents. It hit 76 cents today, a gain of about 110% since. Not bad, but it is just the beginning I believe, as the next couple months will see it cross into dollar+ territory and perhaps up to a couple. From there, 10x by the end of the year?
You can quote me on that.
Though, I am not good at predicting price.
I don't think anyone really is, but with so many predictions getting thrown around, someone is bound to be right, it may as well be me. That sounds like I am entering the lottery, hoping to win- Kind of expecting to win.
I spend a lot of time trying to convince myself out of crypto, where I look at the lack of use case, the prevalence of scam, the position of the media, the pushback from government and all the FUD I can think of, yet, I always end up in the same position. This is going to stick. The more I try to convince myself otherwise, the greater my belief that crypto is going to have a massive impact on the world in ways that I can't imagine. I might not be very imaginative, but I also figure that if I can't imagine all the ways, those who are adamant that the current economy is salvageable, definitely can't. Most don't even seem to see it coming, like a sledgehammer swung through the night air.
The higher price goes, the more attractive HIVE becomes to stake, as it is able to draw from the pool and there is a lot of HIVE liquid currently, about two-thirds. If that starts to get powered up, it is going to get cozy in the pool and it is also going to get a little drafty on the exchanges. A lot of people vying for attention, not a lot of attention out there to be bought. This makes the competition for the pool quite a lot harder, but it also forces for a greater distribution, as with more voters, there comes more potential for vote diversity. The higher the price goes, the more value there is to spread and many of the posts won't be considered worth putting thousands of dollars on, so curation as a job will be common.
There will be problems too of course, like selfvoting and secret alts, but that is what downvotes are for. There will be plenty of spam also, but I think that will either be filtered out by some frontends, or seen as part of the transaction volume that will just get ignored by any serious users.
Price is pretty meaningless in many respects, but it does fundamentally affect the culture of the community, where people consider their vote weightings differently and might even think about whether a post is "worth it" or not. People also get weird and their expectations and entitlements grow astronomically, as if they are owned something, regardless of how they have acted in the past or what they put forward in the present. The entire ecosystem and gamification of Hive changes when the value of the pool increases drastically. The pool was worth around 180K dollars a couple months ago and currently (with blockchain price at 45 cents) it is 800K and if it stays around 60 cents, it will hit a million, 6 dollars it will be ten million or about 125 million dollars in rewards a year for Hive users.
It'd be interesting if the ecosystem could grow to the point that was the floor price one day, because if it did, the amount of value it is paying out to users will likely rival YouTube, and it will be a community that decides who gets what. I wonder what the percentage YouTube takes to offer the infrastructure is in comparison to what it pays its content creators. I suspect, the creators don't get much - the consumers of course get nothing. If we can do much the same across multiple media and experiences, the cost of witnesses will be considered cheap. Though I believe that as the price increases, more witnesses should be brought into the share of tokens, even if the consensus witnesses remain at 20.
Anyway - while I don't put faith in price as an indicator of project, it is undeniable that it affects the way people act on Hive, as it changes the incentive structure to take part. Even while the same amounts of Hive might be distributed, when a dollar that wasn't worth it becomes 10 dollars that is, people feel differently, post differently, behave differently. The changing dynamic will be great for some, while potentially making others feel lost at sea and disconnected. It is up to each of us to take responsibility for our own actions though and it is up to each of us to live with the consequences of them.
This is the thing with a self-governing community with a self-generated economy - the way it functions represents us, including the dysfunctions. There are always problems to face and as long as we keep building solutions, we will evolve to meet the changing needs of the world.
It all might even be "worth it" one day.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
