Cut the Fat!
Alright so I was talking to someone on Discord and they asked me if I had seen the push to tighten up and stop rewarding accounts that are dumping on the network. I had to admit that I did not notice (although I should have). To add to this, I started a powerdown 3 days ago and my last 3 days of posts have had very low payouts. I'm not sure if these two events are correlated, but I stopped the powerdown and powered up 1000 Hive just in case. I can play ball and toe the line if this is what we are doing in the moment. No problem.
@azircon/governing-dynamics-gentleman-top-2500-hive-accounts
@slobberchops/are-you-on-hive-to-invest-or-to-milk-the-cash-cow
@solominer/is-it-okay-to-stake-the-bare-minimum-hp-and-withdraw-everything-else
Is this a good idea?
There are certainly arguments to be made on both sides. Situations like this are often born of crisis so the ideas that get promoted are neither "good" or "bad" but rather more like trying to choose between the rock and the hard-place. Certainly I think we can all agree that action like this is definitely born of a fear and scarcity mindset, which is not ideal. At the same time being down 95% from 2021 is also not ideal, so beggars don't get to be choosers, do they? Sometimes the scarcity mindset is appropriate, or if not appropriate at least understandable.
Are users being overpaid?
Unfortunately a move like this prompts some serious introspection. I think we can all agree that nobody on the platform should engage in delusional thinking. Doing so can only be neutral at best and bad at worst. Consequently, anyone that agrees with the idea that we should not reward accounts that sell must also believe that our users are overpaid and we could really use some better jobs around here that build more value.
Paycheck to Paycheck
Amazon doesn't pay their employees less when they sell Amazon stock. Same with any other company. If Hive wants to pay users less because they are selling the stock... it means the value those users were generating was lower than the amount they were being paid. Living paycheck to paycheck is the standard in the legacy world, and there seems to be a big disconnect in WEB3 because everyone's finances are linked to the spot price of the underlying currency. One person selling can be interpreted as a theft from the entire group.
What else must one admit to?
Well anyone who thinks that we need to make a push to make number go up isn't a buyer of Hive at the lows. Buyers want number to go down so they can buy more. That's just simple buy low sell high ideology 101. So there is certainly a little bit of hypocrisy going around if the most diehard members of the community demand number go up because they are such diehards. Are you done accumulating, anon? Have you had enough? On the other side of that coin is the, "Yeah I think a 95% dip is enough, send it higher already."
Irresponsibly Long
Pretty much everyone on Hive fumbled the bag in 2021. I know if I hadn't dropped the ball so hard I'd have millions of Hive today. Millions... and I'd still be buying these lows and hoping it went even lower. It's provably difficult to be a responsible adult in crypto. And this is true even when other users depend on us to be the responsible adult.
Take, for example, the four year cycle.
Everyone knows it's a four year cycle. Everyone saw how bad @ned fucked us because he fumbled the bag in 2017/2018 and tried to scale up during a bear market year. Then when everything collapses all the money runs out. Well, we got another chance to redeem ourselves in 2021, and it happened again regardless of not having a CEO.
Once again we saw popular apps thinking the bull market was going to last forever and trying to scale up in 2022 when the price plummeted when they should have been hunkering down and buying runway for the EXPECTED long winter. Even when there is an extremely defined pattern everyone gets greedy and rolls with the "this time is different" FOMO. Can we stop? Serious question. It's very much an actions speak louder than words scenario. It should be easy, but it very much is not.
All of Hive's value exists on a plane of supply and demand. It doesn't really matter what the market cap is. That's a very flawed metric. A high market cap with low liquidity can crash into dust immediately. A market with high liquidity can gobble up billions of dollars without the cap changing at all (AKA buy wall).
With this in mind I've always thought it to be very strange that when the hostile takeover happened the common consensus was that, "THE NINJAMINE EXISTS FOR HIVE DEVELOPMENT". Hm, okay well that's an interesting theory but the ninjamined tokens have no value unless they're dumped on the market, and tokens dumped on the market, as we have already established, is basically just stealing value from every other holder on the platform.
So we're determined to cut-the-fat but there's a lack of consensus to defund proposals, which is interesting but not unexpected (development is pretty damn important after all). I haven't done the math or anything but there's a lot of downward pressure coming from the @hive.fund. Without market liquidity the market cap multiplier can get jacked up to x100 and higher: meaning that $1 dumped on an exchange can reduce the market cap of the network by $100 or more. Luckily this also works in the opposite direction during the bull market. Soon™?
I suppose it's time to mention here that I think it's pretty inappropriate that proposals do not have a downvote mechanic. An account either has to downvote every proposal all at the same time by upvoting the return, or not at all. That lack of utility continues to be a problem for this flavor of democracy. All in good time I suppose.
So what's the solution?
Well like with many economic problems the solution is to jump in a time machine back to 2021 and stop everyone from being a degenerate. Economies of scale like this lag hard. Problems like this can't get fixed right away; it takes time for everything to play out. The solution is to buy low and sell high. So why aren't we buying low? Because we got greedy and didn't sell high. This is the standard not the exception. I'd like to think we learned our lesson and will do better the next time opportunity knocks. Until then we gotta suck it up and be scrappy, just like 2019 & 2020. Time is a flat circle.
Thinking in abundance.
Even though times are tight right now I'd still like to believe in the abundance solutions. This means my personal focus has nothing to do with policing what other accounts are doing with their money. It also means I'm not looking to change any of the rules of Hive or any of the inflation rates. I believe we are actually doing just fine across the board.
The real value continues to exist out there in the jungle. There's money flying around everywhere it just needs to be captured in a clever way. I'd say one of our biggest shortcomings for quite some time now is our interoperability. This includes both our liquidity pools in addition to potential connections we can make to BTC and ETH/EVM. Our biggest source of liquidity was Binance and now Binance is fully captured by American regulators. Not good!
Solutions take time and a lot of this stuff is already being worked on. We might call it a waiting game at this point... so yeah if we want to buckle down and start micro-managing accounts during the downtime I can certainly understand why. I don't necessarily have to agree with it in order to comply with this perceived consensus... Even though I could personally dump quite a bit of Hive right now and still mathematically be a net positive to the network over the last four years. It seems like we calculate these things on much shorter timeframes, which is fine albeit noteworthy.
Conclusion
Well it's been four years and this time was not different! I really thought it would be different considering four years ago we were dealing with way more adversity than we are now. Perhaps I need to reevaluate those theories.
I have a lot of gratitude and consider myself to have great privilege to be able to support Hive during a time like this... full-time crypto since September 2021. I'm a year away from making it a full cycle, and I have a feeling I'm not going to be disappointed.
I am however a little concerned for those who are not as lucky as I am. The cruise ship that is fiat is sinking slowly and these crypto lifeboats are choppy as hell. I just hope that one day soon we're able to collectively come to a resolution that doesn't involve punishing people for being poor (or just bad with money). Dream big!