Hard Fork 25 is fast approaching and will be making significant changes to how curation rewards work, add the ability to convert Hive for HBD, as well as some other changes.
Each hard fork tries to bring us closer to a perfect ecosystem. In my opinion, we will never get there, but if we can keep making progress towards it, I think we will be in good shape.
What do you think is one thing we can change with Hive to be wildly successful?
For me the answer is simple, more users. I firmly believe almost every problem we have on Hive will be better or fixed completely with more users.
Price, More users means more people needed resource credits and wanting to increase their influence. If we had 1M users that would be at least 20-50M Hive needed for a minimum amount of resource credits (20-50) each. Although I do see dApps being the only ones to onboard at this level and by then we will have RC Pools which will help reduce the need to delegate Hive Power directly. There will still be a significantly higher demand on having Hive.
Rewards, I think this is a big area of improvement as well. While many will not want to see more competition for their rewards, I think it will be a big improvement. While the rewards of everyone might go down as they are spread to more people, we won't have as much "clumping" of rewards on popular people. Curators will have more quality content (hopefully) to curate, and search engines will have more topical content to index. It is likely the increased demand on Hive will counteract the thinned out rewards with an increased price.
dApps, Imaging dApps like dCity, Splinterlands, Leo with over 1M users? These projects have been wildly successful with a relatively small userbase. With many more users will likely mean many more dApps and many more users using Hive dApps in general. As dApps grow their userbase a snowball effects starts to happen where their users bring in more users. Hive is small enough that one successful dApp can easily double or triple our userbase over night.
While I think increasing our userbase is likely the most critical thing we can do, there are a few other things that I think would be critical to our success.
Marketing
We need people to know we exist, we need developers to know the value Hive offers over other blockchains. This can only be done with marketing. Marketing doesn't always means ads, it can be other indirect ways to get attention, like a Hackathon, interviews, podcasts collaborations, or getting out in VR and hosting events.
Smart contracts
Smart contracts are nothing new or revolutionary, and many blockchains already have them. They do open the door for trustless dApps that are not centralized on one person. It also allows you to build things that would be possible without them. I always use Gods Unchained an example of this. Hive would be wildly successful if we got a project like Gods Unchained to use Hive rather than Ethereum. A big hurdle to doing this is the lack of smart contracts.
What do you think is the biggest change we could make to make Hive more popular?