As I mentioned in my previous post our community and the others we are supporting are being slammed lately which is great to see as so many migrated fast and became active quick both users and dapps+services. This has though resulted in our voting power getting rekt, I can't remember last time it has been this low (~50%) so I decided to put my money where my mouth is and power up some Hive and delegate it to @ocd.
Alright so now this is obviously not financial advice and looking at the past and considering I'm a bit in debt at the moment you really should not put any money into my advice that you can't afford to lose, but hear me out.
There's a lot of talk about DPOS not being great, some pointing out to what happened to Steem with the governance through voting with the big Steemit stake, some point towards exchanges and how they did the same thing with their customers funds and many other DPOS currencies (many even way bigger than ours) are in danger of the same thing happening to them not to mention the cartels and votetrading that forms over there where producing blocks is the only inflation. No blockchain is perfect, what we lack in security we make up for it in flexibility, speed and scalability but at the same time you could notice through the rallying of votes we went through to vote in real witnesses that when things matter and are being pointed out how important they are people will pull through and show the strenghts of this technology that we have here.
With the move to Hive now we have eliminated one of the biggest attack vectors and then some considering the powering up that occurred by the central authority that was attempting to win the voting battle not realizing that's not the war. As for exchanges I am hoping we can get them to perform the action of opting out from voting for governance permanently and then the only attack vector is of course money. Someone or a group of someone's buying up so much stake that they can overtake the governance again but for that to happen there have to of course also be sellers on the market and on the market things can get dangerous; there's always a bigger fish in the sea meaning that someone attempting to manipulate a certain market may end up getting rekt by someone else who may have noticed what they're up to. This is of course speculative and doesn't happen often unless you're margin trading and wonder why these big swings keep occurring so often and why the price of Bitcoin and others isn't more stable - they're out for your and other "dumb" money and by moving the markets is how they get it, they may not even care about Bitcoin and it's future to be able to do that. So with a higher price attempting to lure people to sell more and more also remember that the big fish that are here will have way more funds to play with and maybe manipulate their manipulations. On top of that in the next HF there will also be the 1 month cooldown timer for accounts recently powering up before they can vote for governance and proposals.
To get back to the point of this post, after four years of thinking that things will go well with a central authority guiding this blockchain and our community into the future I think it became quite clear that it wasn't working. Who knows, maybe if it had been someone else in charge who wasn't as in it for the money things could've gone differently and a big authority like Steemit with their share of the supply could've made wonders for Steem but that was clear it wasn't happening. Now we enter untested territory, not completely untested of course cause there are some currencies such as DASH or DeCred who also work with a DAO and are way more decentralized in the decisions of funding and how to move the currency further in development, marketing, etc. Needless to say they've been doing better than Steem did. I'm not going to talk about Steem and its possible future with the people in charge of it there by the way if you were wondering about that.
Source
Now then, we are finally free from the chains of centralization and the work we've put in all these years didn't have to go to waste that much, only a name change/rebrand which in crypto is usually a good thing from what I've experienced.
In this post I just want to make everyone aware of what it is they are holding and the possible value of it. This is Steem the way it was meant to be, free, decentralized, without fear and without censorship. While many keep saying that the promises of the ill-gained stake should not have been held accountable I can tell you first hand that I know a lot of investors who I've talked to directly who invested and stayed invested because of what I mentioned above; they thought this central authority was working for the best outcome of the economy and users and was being an advantage on the platform instead of turning into a disadvantage which proved to have been for personal gain all along. All those investors who didn't invest because of the Steemit stake turned out to have made the right decision in the end but do note that once they hear things are different now and distribution is better they may not feel the same way any longer.
Coming to distribution, as someone who has attempted to assist distribution of this currency as well as he has been able to through the ups and downs the past 3+ years and am happy to say that due to some of my involvement it may have improved and I consider Steem to be one of the best distributed currencies out there throughout the whole world. I realize there are many content creators and users on Hive now who rely on their rewards and have to make a difficult decision of which one to use for their day to day spendings and I'm personally at least going to try my hardest to hodl Hive as much as I can. Of course I realize everyone would prefer to be a hodler but some just can't and are grateful for the opportunities to exist here that make their life easier and that's okay. I'm talking more about those who may feel that this airdrop means "lol free coins I can dump and go to vegas for a fun weekend", it doesn't take a genius to check exchange accounts on the block explorer to figure out that there is buying occurring and many whales who can are powering up. It also goes without saying that some users from a certain location in the world who missed out on the airdrop are doing their best they can to sell their airdrop they had on exchanges as soon as they can while Hive is just on one exchange right now to make it look like the opposite version of it is doing much better but here it's not about who wins the battle but the long war and that war entails a lot of other things than just the current price and if you're instead focused on growing your hive account as much as possible than this is a very good opportunity to.
One thing I know and am certain about is that with this newfound freedom and developers coming back to Hive to create and assist in the further evolution of this currency I have never been more sure about where I am keeping my value. I realize that the next few months may not look great for the price but what you should be looking at is the development, growth and enthusiasm being put into the work by former projects, devs and users that are excited about this currency again. So what I want to tell you is just to be careful and not make any rash decisions. I remember there were a lot of people back in the day who got the Bitcoin Cash airdrop and just considered it as free money and even though the "flippening" never occurred there where BCH would overtake the marketcap of BTC with Hive and Steem things are way, way more different and I am personally looking forward the day when that occurs and I hope that means we'll just be valued more and not that the other gets completely rekt by a major stakeholder which would mean a lot of bagholders would lose a lot of money cause that's not something you would want to wish on anyone and at the same time competition is good for this space so bring it on. :)
