My signature move on Hive is to insert puns and jokes into most of my comments and posts - I guess you could call it my meme legacy, a compilation of clownery for future blockchain archeologist to study and ponder how such buffoons were even allowed to exists in our times. But occasionally my antics are not that obvious and can fly under the radar, especially if the reader is not familiar to how I roll. You can't always hint the tone of a statement just with written words although I try my best. For example the title of this post is an intentional oxymoron ( meaning two incompatible terms that are put side by side ), shenanigans can't be serious, but there is a reason to the madness that becomes apparent while reading the rest of this post. However, a casual reader might think that this old clown is just a retard and while he wouldn't be entirely wrong, that's not the point :P
I memed on HBD countless times in the past, and I recently called it an "aspirational stable coin", which to me is amusing given how I perceive Hive as the "little blockchain that could". So by calling it aspirational I'm poking fun at the fact HBD, like many other features of Hive, is still trying to get to a point where it performs as you would expect, but it's not there yet even after 5 years of development. So when I saw a post about HBD written for LBI by a new-ish author I had to share my "wisdom" regarding our sort-of-stable-coin. The humorous part if that he took the "aspirational stable coin" part seriously and even quoted my comment in a follow-up post addressing some issues people raised in the comments about how he portrayed HBD. Don't get me wrong, the author in question seems like a super nice guy, evident by how he tries to take into account other people's feedback, however quoting the silly clown on a serious and complicated topic like HBD just tickles my funny bone :D. Here is the post in question.
Joking aside HBD is not the easiest thing to wrap your head around and it's no wander there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding it. Of course, me calling it an "aspirational stable coin" doesn't really help :P. But I'm not the only one to blame, if you use peakd as a front end and go to the wallet tab there is a description for HBD: "Another Hive token which is often rewarded on posts". Isn't that as clear as muddy water ?. Ecency is a bit closer to the mark with: "Tokens worth about $1.00 of HIVE" - which at least gives a hint about what HBD actually is. But I still think there is a better and clearer explanation out there which can be condensed into a few sentences and plastered everywhere you stumble onto HBD, or a tooltip could appear when you hover over you HBD balance. Small changes like this could go a long way in helping the casual users have a better grasp of our sort-of-stable-not-backed-by-fiat-but-still-visually-tied-to-the-dollar token.
Hive is growing more and more complex with each hard fork ( the upcoming resource credit delegation and management features for example ) which won't help with the existing user retention issues so I think any way we can make the life of newbies easier and more streamline the better it will be for the success of the entire blockchain.