I was very excited to see the sudden and huge increase in the value of the HIVE token today. As many of you know, it shot up by over 80%. It made me wish I bought a whole lot more HIVE, but there will be other opportunities, I am sure. When I was researching the news of the past 24hours trying to determine why the price suddenly skyrocketed, several possibilities emerged:
- The game Splinterlands continues to dominate on dappradar and is pulling in more and more people daily.
- Yesterday, as many know, Facebook had a major outage. Could this have lent power to the HIVE token?
- The company Hive Blockchain, unaffiliated with our beloved Hive, released its quarterly earnings report yesterday. And they did amazingly well!
In the past the Hive Blockchain company has tried to get our Hive to cease and desist from using the name Hive. Clearly, that has not been successful. The result is that there are two Hive blockchains. One is an actual blockchain, i.e. the Hive on which I am writing this. The other is the Hive blockchain company.
While to people using Hive and people in the know at the Hive blockchain company, it is easy to discern the two, the average invester might be forgiven for getting confused. In the wake of the glowing earnings report, and given how poorly the stock market has been doing, such an invester might see the HIVE token as a bargain (which it probably is anyhow) and be happy to purchase. However, what will this do in the long run? Will investers figure out their mistaken identity investment or might they be prompted to investigate the Hive and all its potential? I prefer to believe this.
Regardless of why the price jumped, it is a very exciting development, and I hope the upward trend continues. It must be frustrating for the Hive blockchain company. Obviously, they believe in blockchain technology or they wouldn't be mining Bitcoin. Nonetheless, it is the decentralization inherent in the technology that makes it difficult to impossible for them to actually prevent Hive from using the name. Who can they sue? Who would shut it down? Regardless of the awesome news for us and whether or not it does come from mistaken identity, this raises some interesting questions for the future. For example, what if a blockchain called itself Facebook and was not owned by a single entity? What would Zuck do? I don't think there is much he could do.
