five years on hive

five years in this space is a relatively long time.

it’s crazy how much this space has matured but also, it took time, it took many years, like a fine wine or a whisky aging, the game is survival in many respects. You just gotta bottle it up and store it away somewhere safe and dark, heck even forget about it. I did that with a hardware wallet and some ETH and was pleasantly surprised this year when i checked back in on it.

staking in this space has become a big thing for me, swapping from creating TX records for the chain as much (i.e content creation) to a more realistic and fairly stable/secure way of staking for returns in the future. Moving away from the digital teet of receiving algorithmic payments for involvement and instead dollar (pound) averaging in on the things i’m using in that moment.

photo by annie sprat on unsplash

I recently came back to this particular blockchain (did you know there are over 10k of blockchain projects out there now) because i had forgotten that i had some early stake in alpha/beta cards from many years ago, those are now worth real world money and renting them (kinda staking) gives me a return in DEC every single day — we even have the SPS (splinter shards) governance token and that’s trading in a few places and splinter lands is open to many methods of interfacing it — it’s stronger than ever.

as for the rest of the chain, i’ve not really kept up with things, it seems to still be the same faces in the places they were, digging in heels, centralising their intention on a decentralised land — stacking power and control. not the decentralised promised land that we all hoped would have their own smart controls and ability to build out and skin your own community future. It’s not all bad thou, there are some great things here and much utility if you choose to dig.

i don’t think there will ever be a better steem/hive time than the steemfest2 for me, that’s locked and loaded in my brain as a really good memory, pre-yawn times where everyone was fairly decent and relatively friendly — i’m glad in many ways that events are virtual now, i think if i was to ever go to another event i’d be a little bit more low key and just flit in and out of the after party events or something.

the truth is my tribe is not here, never was, it’s not on some of the decentralized video platforms i use either, in fact most of the time my tribe is either in real life (tm) and private discord servers for people i know, or who know people from analog/physical life and therefore have become an extension of a friend of a friend i know — we’ve become the people in our tribe that get asked about “this crypto stuff” and that’s ok with me, most of these people will only get in years from now when it’s current or popular, rarely do people have the creative follow through to ride it out for a number of years until it’s ready to pop.

and like a good wine or whisky (i had some wine last night actually) i’ll certainly be toasting a drink tonight to the blockchain for all those memories that travel with me and hopefully to another five years on this chain, so many future connections to potentially make, so many decentralised learnings to share. So much self governance to feel empowered by — only blockchains can give us back our keys to our castles.

have a great week
humble x