Ah remember a year ago?
I member.
Last year I was flashing my Hive account to friends and family during Thanksgiving showcasing the fact that my account was worth half a million dollars and I was about to lose most of it because there was no way for me to cash out due to all my stake being powered up. Ah, how right I was. One year later Hive finds itself around 90% lower than the previous peak.
But that's how the cookie crumbles in crypto. Hard to have any regrets when it's absolutely impossible to know where the number is gonna go. By all accounts Hive could have just as easily spiked to over $10 from there. After all, Bitcoin went x3.5 higher than the previous all time high in 2017. Hive going x3.5 higher than Steem's all time high puts us at $24+. How wild would that be? One day.
Hive continues to be ignored in the context a social media network, and that's fine. Everyone wants to build the thing. Everyone knows corning the market on crypto social media is perhaps one of the most lucrative goals out there. It will take a dozen failures across the board before people capitulate and simply join in on the thing we've already been building here for years.
To be fair Hive isn't even a social media site. Hive is whatever we build on it. Could be a gaming network. I've even joked a few times that it could be a porn network that completely overshadows sites like Onlyfans. Although somehow I doubt that stakeholders around here would allow that to happen. Sounds like a downvote war waiting to happen to me.
This is one reason why I really like the idea of Bluesky and how this is all part of the process. Bluesky is going to fail miserably. It would be great if it didn't because then we could incorporate whatever open source code they use that has success, but that's not going to be the case. Jack thinks that casual users are going to run nodes and provide infrastructure to the network for free. It's magical thinking that apparently needs to be slapped down in this jungle we call real life rather than just being an obviously failed experiment from game-theory alone.
When a network gets built with zero incentives, the only ones that provide infrastructure will be huge centralized entities that will be forced to monetize the data with targeted ads and whatever else. Jack already knows this is exactly what he needs to avoid, but somehow doesn't realize that what he is building leads to this exact situation when refusing to launch a token.
More and more people are talking about "blockchain not Bitcoin/crypto" during this bear market flush. Too be expected. When hundreds of scams and failed experiments are all going insolvent it only makes logical sense that developers would look for a way to avoid the scammy aspects of the projects they are looking at.
The problem with this idea is that blockchain is nothing without a token to back it up. Without a token, there are no incentives. This makes it impossible to create a decentralized network, because again the only reason for people to provide infrastructure are the same old WEB2 datamining tactics that lead to gross centralization and invasions of privacy and security.
It's pretty safe to say that if crypto doesn't crash any more from here, this bear market wasn't THAT terrible. A 77% dip on Bitcoin and a 90% dip on Hive would be pretty standard (or even preferable) to previous bear markets. There are still a ton of threats out there in terms of FTX contagion but also these threats have been blown way out of proportion and may blow over in a month or two. Maybe not. We'll see.
The minutes from the last FED meeting were released recently and were attributed to the small New Moon pump we saw yesterday. Funny because the FED is just doing what they've been saying they're going to do for like 6 months. Now suddenly the FED is being referred to as "dovish" when their stance hasn't changed at all. I think this shows how time is the great equalizer here and we really just have to weather the storm and wait out these insane conditions.
Conclusion
Focusing on the development is important. So many projects are progressing forward concurrently. Even though the chance of Bluesky failing is high, just the fact that it's being built on the Lightning Network increases the perceived value of crypto and could easily be enough to dig us out of the hole we've fallen into. Markets are not rational. In fact they are so irrational that Bitcoin created a new low when an exchange went insolvent that was holding zero Bitcoin in reserves. Make it make sense.
At the end of the day Bitcoin bear markets last around a year. How long has it been since peak? A year. So why is everyone losing their mind and saying it's all a scam and will never recover? Ah well that's exactly what we'd expect to hear at the bottom. No one on Hive seems to be that worried at all. We've all been through the ringer before and made it out on the other end just fine. This time is no different.