I've had the same vision for Hive since day one, and I'm pretty sure most that follow me can almost say word for word what I think Hives main value case is and how it can be utilized. When blocktrades talked about Hive's future as a 2nd layer blockchain network, I agree with this approach. When blocktrades talked about Hive's future as a 2nd layer blockchain network, I agree with this approach.
"Anyone can write their own 2nd layer Hive application that gives meaning to these custom_json transactions, and they can do it without requiring any changes to the “core” Hive software."
Basically states that Hive can do whatever you want it it do, you give meaning to the information you're storing in custom_json transaction.
"I want to use it to launch Hive-based applications for computationally-enhanced information sharing, which is something I’ll talk about in more depth another time."
But what kind of applications will be built? We can buidl anything we can think of, what do you think the free market will choose to with this power of choice?
I am the first to say jack of all trade’s masters of none, in this case I think Hive will specialize in a certain area, not because of code limitations, but because the free market will utilize Hive in certain ways. I believe what will be prominently built on Hive are web3 sites.
We will not beat out Bitcoin as a store of value because Bitcoin has a fixed supply. We will not beat out ETH for DEFI (anytime soon) because of its first mover advantage and critical mass of liquidity. While every other chain is trying to “out scale” ETH, they miss the boat entirely. Liquidity makes the world go round. Liquidity is king and damn near impossible to replace once reaching a critical mass.
Go to where the liquidity is and bring a straw.
What ETH cannot do well is what Hive was born to do. If you want a plug and play social site, you go to Hive. Therefore bridging to ETH, atomic swaps, impregnate eth with Hive and people don’t have to choose between access to liquidity (dexes are the future if that isn’t apparent by now, uniswap does more REAL vol than 80% of cexes, cant wash trade onchain without getting rekt by fees) – so we have an incredible spot here.
While other chains try to fight ETH, we jump on ETHs shoulder and cement our value prop while there is zero competition. When people finally wake up and realize ETH has won DEFI, competition for everything will be fierce. But right now, gamers do not want to pay high fees for their NFTs, social sites most haven’t even comprehended because most don’t look past things that are not built/bridged to ETH. In a way Hive can bridge to ETH for access to decentralized liquid markets, ETH can bridge to Hive for scalable web 3 solutions for everything from gaming to social sites.
Could Hive become as liquid as ETH? Of course, but I like to take the route that wins on all fronts. IBC will never be bad no matter if we are ranked 100th or 1st.
Web3 sites with tokenized communities, NFTs floating around, interactive games, censorship-free experience. Sites become "skins" and if one censer your post another will gladly take your business. You do not have to start over with your follower count or your content which will make frontends more accountable for their actions. The days of siloed information is over. Hive enables WordPress like super features but are upgraded to web 3 features.
Plug and play social sites and communities, no other anything in this world can offer what Hive offers. We are a one-stop-shop for everything one could ever need to build a decentralized site. "Decentralize the Web" is Tron's motto, fuck that, that is our motto, that title belongs to us! We should be telling people you can build the next Facebook on Hive. Oh, and Facebook is a half a trillion-dollar market cap company. You could do the same with Youtube, Twitter, etc. That is one hell of a story to pitch to any investor.
I have been pitching that to whales since I have been here, to great success mind you. However, there has always been an issue with the long lockups with no way out. I have said this many times in the past, that is why we do not see many whales powering up, but they are out there, trust me I know a lot of them.
Web 3 sites are not just your Facebook's, Twitter, and YouTubes, it is your everything. Splinterlands for instance I consider a web 3 dapp. I believe games and social go hand in hand and I think that's where Hive will shine. Build a game with a web 3 and an immutable community with your own token. That is Hive, that is bullish, that makes me get super excited every time I say it.
The Value of HIVE
I copied these ideas from a recent post by Yabapmatt.
Hive as an Immutable Content Store
I believe this is the backbone of Hive's value prop. It is mandatory in web 3 for any social site to give users the ability to have a censorship-free experience. While alone it would not be giving Hive its full potential, but as a base layer to start, it is key. Without this, you have nothing to build on top. This is just layer 1 of our story that we pitch to investors.
Hive as an Advertising Platform
I am an extraordinarily strong believer in decentralized advertising. Hive, with proof of brain, has given an incredibly unique twist to how this is done. However, I believe the best way to go about this is "burn to promote."
This is the pitch. You have a million subscribers in your community, bring them to hive, create an immutable community with plug and play web 3 sites (Tribes, etc.) - now you have your own token. The next step would have built into condenser ad slots where the site owner can predetermine how much that ad slot cost. The payment will be in the community token. Thus, "advertise here" slot, you click, it says x amount of token to advertise here for x time. You deposit it, the token is burnt, and your ad shows up. If your ad is offensive the site owner can take it down anytime.
Now this person with a million followers can monetize the community in a way that was impossible before and create a market cap for that community attention that is liquid with 24/7, censorship-free trading.
Bid bots were not a bad idea, just abused in practice. You cannot advertise for free or the token will lose value over time and the ads will overtake the platform with shit. However, if bid bots burned a portion of their rev, they might not be slammed with downvotes. I honestly believe in the bid bot model, I think it is great, however, it needs to be BULLISH for Hive for the long term, not the short term.
What makes Hive valuable for ads are the second layer token economies like Leo, etc., that use ad dollars to buy back tokens off the market. Buybacks, buybacks and burns, ad rev distribution to token hodlers, etc. these are endless ways to monetize attention that Hive allows people to do by giving them to easy tool necessary. The value comes back to hive by needing RC's on the main chain, just like ETH gets its value by needing to use it for gas.
The reason 2nd layer ad tokens make sense is because there will be a owner to said coin. That means that owner is incentives to go out and buy/burn their token to increase the value. Since Hive is decentralized, no one wants to go out there and buy Hive to burn it, just the same no one wants to do that with Bitcoin. However, RCs are the trick here, 2nd layer ad token economies can become massive and they will need to have RC’s to be able to keep their ad network running. We should look to add ways into condenser to make ads seamlessly tied to token burns.
Of course, the 2nd layer tokens can also have PoB, Bid bots setups where users are more incentives to burn profit to raise the market cap of their tokens. Centralization is good because it is greedy and will do what’s in the best interest of the centralized party. Make the tokens censorship resistant and let people place bets on front ends in which will drive the most traffic thus has the most ad rev.
Hive as an Incentivization Platform
Everyone that knows me knows this is my bread and butter. This is how you rally a community, get people engaged, make the atmosphere fun and energetic. This is one of the greatest things about Hive and one of the main reasons I am hesitant to remove the universal reward pool. My vision has never been that Hive is a content discovery platform. Ever. That is impossible without centralization. Communities will carve out niche topics that are heavily curated. You cannot curate a universal buffet of content in a decentralized way and think we will have any kind of real content discovery the masses will enjoy.
The power of hives universal reward pool is the distribution of the token. that is why Roger Ver (hate em or love em) would give out tiny bits of bitcoin to ppl because getting coin into as many hands as possible is the end goal.
The network effect is what makes value, there is no easier way to onboard a user then to say hey here is your Hive acct it has x amount of hive in it, good day. Then they will hawk the price and when it goes up, they will become interested. But it takes a thousand tiny seeds to be planted.
That is why hives distribution model is so effective because it is in so many hands. There is not a more diverse network effect in crypto. I know many hive users that have never even used bitcoin before they earned Hive for the first time, not many cryptos, if any can say that.
Therefore, I believe the curve is a bad idea because it takes away from comment rewards which lower people wanting to put the effort to make great comments. hell, we should have trending comments, because some can be better than the actual content written or can complete it in some way. We should reward that do not penalize that; we know the curve hurts comments the most.
So, I see hive as a place to come buidl your web3 site, plug, and play NFTs and marketplaces. Communities will become sites as we are seeing already. Make this process trustless and decentralized and you have a madlad use case. AS for the universal reward pool, I am still not ready to give it up, there needs to be a way to achieve the same effect that it has without putting a burden on investors.
Also, I will come back to the instant powerdown with a 5% burn fee. This is the best idea IMO to get investors powering up their stake. You can make it optional, you have one chance to add it or not, if you click no it becomes impossible to get. I understand we want to protect users, but people hold tons of ETH in metamask all the time, yes many get scammed, but it’s a much better user experience for the responsible users. I am not a fan of lowering the ceiling for all to protect a few. We can also have whitelisted withdraws, 2fa, all kinds of things to help users better protect themselves. This is a hill I will continually die on because I have not been convinced its better to force people into a 13-week lockup with zero way out.
Here is an idea, how about when people instant powerdown half the 5% fee is burned, and the other half is given to users who are powered up? That would make it more valuable to power up hive because during bull runs ppl who hold thru will be rewarded vs the dumpers. But we do need to sit down, our best minds and come up with a more bullish solution vs a 13-week forced lock up. I pitch my story, all investors high fiving saying this is amazing, then I get to the forced 13-week lockup and the air leaves the room. 13- week without a way out is just not going to fly with most, look at the exchanges that misused funds they felt like they were dealing with an alien currency.
We need a way to get in and out, either shorten the period for powering up to some very low and remove the universal reward pool to a second layer (that can be powered up longer?) or have a way to get out instant for a burn fee where half burned half to stakers. (I just thought of this idea this morning, started writing this last night and I think it’s a badass idea, imagine how much more hive you’ll earn during a bull for hodling.)
That is how banks CDs work, you lock up funds for higher interest but if your family member gets sick and u need medical bills u can withdraw it for a penalty. Make the Hive account feel like a bank account, a high yield CD. Show how much inflation you are receiving, show future projects, etc. That is all front-end stuff, but you get my point.
I will end this post with an idea. How about a way for investors to “opt out” of curation? Let us all agree of an amount of staking rewards that is fair and would entice people to power up Hive. Let us say 8%. However, with good curation you can earn up to 20%! Not guaranteed and far from your average results, but its possible. You can also earn 5% or lower in curation if your voting sucks. So, I say we gives investors a hands free way to earn a set amount that is both lower than the highest potential for curators (to give people a reason to curate) but is higher then shitty curation rewards.
I would say that number is between 8-10% and we can lower it as the inflation lowers in sync with everything else. This way investors never have to deal with curation and will not get shafted if they do not participate. There is both a world where a universal reward pool exists and a way to opt out and still receive rewards.
If we can get that stake reward to be as close to the avg curation reward as possible it will only incentive the best curators to use their stake.
However, the universal reward pool is for much more than just rewards, you can build a large following by upvoting comments (remove the damn curve!) and you can build a “army” of loyal comrades by rewarding them with upvotes. We can always polish this system, make it more patron. However, we must look at the free market and what is being utilized the most and what works. Bidbots worked but were flawed. That can be said by a lot of things not just Hive. It is our job not to throw the baby out with the bath water, brainstorm solutions and try everything before removing anything.
And as I said before, the best things on Hive are what we have yet to invent. What is a web 3 site? I believe it is much more than anyone can quite comprehend. I'm also looking to see if Hive becomes more used for other things, like immutable data dumps for other chains (good thing, need RCs) - so many different lanes Hive can go down. However, I believe it is best to get your vision for Hive and buidl it into reality. Getting a mass of people to see the exact same thing with a tool that is capable of anything is a fruitless task. Free market does all the thinking for us, we just need to listen to it. Cheers Hivers.