As I hope all of you know, I'm as Hive maximalist as someone can get. I've got so much love for this project, the people involved and those who post here day in and day out. Many of whom I probably don't know yet, at least that was my experience on SteemFest 3. There are so many people, it's crazy.
Anyway, the reason I'm writing this post is that I noticed something interesting. The APR on dlease for STEEM is double of that as one can get on HIVE.
Left: Hive | Right: Steem
What this means, is that people are willing to pay more STEEM for Steempower, than people are willing to pay HIVE for Hivepower.
Now, the reason is not that STEEM is worth more. (Even though SBD is way above peg and 100% Powerup posts also earn TRX for some additional ~4% APR).
It's primarily that HIVE is punishing self-voting, where a stakeholder would get curation rewards + author rewards, and expects stakeholders to curate and to "donate" to the authors posting on HIVE.
I understand the reasoning and truly believe it's ethically superior to curate honestly to incentivize an active community than self-voting, selling the votes or circle-curating
However, I've also got a very rational side, the side that managed a bid-bot & was pro-vote-selling because the demand was simply there and drove activity on the chain. The side that understands that people are not just taking a risk & locking their money into a currency, to give money to strangers, so the strangers can sell the rewards to buy more Bitcoin.
Obviously, there are many brilliant people on Hive who are authoring amazing posts and keep the rewards or sell part of it to cover invoices, etc. In return, Hive has a thriving & active community.
However, I can't help but think about the investors who might look at the trending feed and think to themselves: "So that's the content I'm paying a 50% curation tax on? Well, that's a turn-off. I'll just lock my money into liquidity pools."
What would you tell those investors? That their logic is flawed? That they're egoistic & greedy people?
There are people who want to min/max everything and get turned-off when they can't do so or when they're forced to forfeit ~half of potential earnings.
And I believe we should make sure that those are also welcome to Hive.
There has to be a demand & supply economy between stakeholders and authors, where authors have a reason to level up their content if they want stakeholders to give part of their inflation to them.
