I don't have a trader mentality. I have tried building one, but I tend to have more of a hodl mindset than a continual buy and sell process. Ideally, I have looked to find a hybrid approach, which I am taking and improving, but it definitely doesn't feel natural for me and then, I am also quite conservative, even though I am trying to be more risk-seeking in my investment. I currently have somewhere around 15% of my total value in farms, which I think is probably a little too much and it is getting uncomfortable, so I will hold my position here, hodl what I harvest and cross fingers that it all plays out well.
Last night with friends, we were talking about how much wealth is held in crypto and saying how rare it is to have "success stories" on Hive where people have bought houses or something significant from their activity. It has made some people, especially the early miners and active accounts, substantial amounts and possibly tens of millions of dollars, but for the most part, these accounts are anonymous/ pseudonymous and they are "unknowns" - making their success stories far less valuable within the community or externally for marketing. Marketing requires real people.
But then, this level of financial success on Hive is unlikely for content creators alone - where for example, someone like me had zero investments prior to joining four years ago. While I have more (in crypto) now, it isn't exactly going to pay my house off (at these prices) and if I did do that, I would have no stake left.
While we all want the value of HIVE to go up and there to be more people coming into the Hive ecosystem platform, we also don't tend to want to have that happen by propelling users and creating Hive celebrities. Imagine a scenario where an account of a human face was heavily supported to the point that they were earning hundreds of thousands or millions in HIVE a year and they were willing to appear in local magazines and news, slowly spiraling out into more public appearances, pushing Hive as their success story, their lottery win. This would generate a great deal of interest in the platform and as that built, more people would be able to do the same.
However, it is impossible to do because no matter the potential value they might bring in taking that approach, the community will never provide that level of support (at these prices at least) to an individual content creator. Firstly, there would be far too much contention on who that should be and then because of the level of support, they would be met with a lot of the rewards returned to the pool for redistribution.
As much as it would be brilliant to have "Hive stars" - perhaps it is better that it is a far slower, organic process in their development, rather than an engineered strategy to market a Hive personality. Perhaps it is also healthier for the distribution in general, as once there are true Hive celebrities, there will be far less opportunity to earn HIVE on content, as the competition will turn increasingly professional. This might not matter too much, as the goal is of course to monetize the second-layer also, not just the infrastructure.
This is something a lot of people also forget in terms of the future of Hive as a platform, what is needed is good governance that is driven by improving the ecosystem from the ground up, the Hive Blockchain up. Part of that governance is incentivizing holding Hive and actively improving the ecosystem, so I see that just like witness earnings, over time there will be continuing shift to rewarding stake, not content. This will take years, but I suspect that at some point in the future, earning stake through content will be hard, so buying it might be the only option.
As I see it, at some point, there will be a consolidation of liquid Hive into staked Hive, because the incentive to do so will be higher than the incentive to keep selling, if all the stake came back onto the platform today, the draw on the reward pool would change significantly, but hopefully, so would the value of HIVE in the market place. There has been talk in the recent past about stopping rewards altogether on Hive, but I don't think that will happen for quite a few years to come.
Which means, that while no individual is likely to be able to become a massive Hive celebrity in the short term, least of all the people who are anonymous, there is the potential for many people to earn a stake for the future. However, there is obviously always a lot of sell pressure on the markets, especially from all that early mine HIVE that is still floating about. I am not sure if it was 200 or 250 million HIVE in the initial mine, but even with the current rewards over the last 5 years from the pool, the majority of HIVE in the supply is from the first weeks of the blockchain, that went into a very small group of hands.
Since those times, a lot of the HIVE mined has changed hands however, so it can be very different kinds of people owning it, including myself, who has been probably buying some of it off exchanges for years. While a high price of HIVE is desirable, the platform itself requires strong staking mindset as well, where people are willing to forgo the short price for long-term participation, where as infrastructure owners, the value of their HIVE and earning potential is correlated to the health of the second-layer ecosystem and marketplaces for content and tokens that are built upon it.
This is also why it is vital to build the infrastructure well, as having a lot of people in houses on the ground becomes very unhealthy, if the pipes below do not carry fresh water in and waste water out of the ecosystem. A community needs more than buildings to live in, they need tools to use with and places to work and in order to provide sustainability, there has to be the infrastructure layers that everything is built upon.
The people who build the infrastructure are not celebrities and while people can name highly paid Instagram stars, I can't imagine many people for example, knowing the founders of Instagram off the top of their head. Without the platform, there is no star.
However this isn't to undermine the value of content, because content on Hive is highly valuable, because it becomes part of the usecase for being in the Hive community in the first place, to be part of the ecosystem. And I suspect that the people who get this, are also likely the ones who are powering up what they can, despite their IRL life positions - because they recognize that content isn't enough, support is needed.
Sustainability takes time to develop, it takes thought, as well as trial and error, but most of all, it takes people who are willing to ride it out, rather than those who are going to chase short-term ROI constantly. The challenge is that the short gains can be so high for an individual, that they are willing to lose the long view where sustainability of economy is available for many. 100% into maximum gains, nothing left to support the growth of the ecosystem. It can be fine for an individual that makes it, because they can skip from stone to stone, but nothing of consequence ever gets built and the majority will continually suffer - I think we have seen how it all turns out - because that is what happens in the general economy now.
Perhaps in here are some other reasons as to why I don't have a trader mentality either. Traders can operate in a vacuum of self, not worrying about anyone else in the market as they are all unknowns and they can see themselves as "self-made" without realizing that in order for their trades to have any value at all, community of millions of people over lifetimes have had to build everything they ever use. Their opportunity, has come at the cost of another persons investment of some kind. I see Hive like this, where one piece of the ecosystem is impossible without many of the others aligning to bring it all together, to form the relationships needed to give it the potential to exist and have value.
Nothing of value exists in a vacuum, except for the space to build something.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]