Alternately entitled: "Building in public, celebrating and suffering in private. What day is it? Ow, my guts. When can I sleep?"
βοΈ Please note:
I originally started this post at the end of... February? of 2024, shortly after @martibis wrote a proposal for me. I intended to spend a few weeks ruminating on what I thought about it all, finish up doing a few global keynotes and presentations in SEA, UAE and the states, then to consider writing my own and neatly wrap it all up before my on chain anniversary. SO. You can see how that's been going. π I'll crack on with it and explain why down at the bottom. Long, likely dull post is incoming! You can expect nothing less from your girl.
β οΈ ANOTHER EDIT: I'm getting tagged a lot, in a case of seemingly only skimming and misunderstanding this post entirely, so better to set it straight, even though almost all of you already know:
I have been working full time, almost every single day, for Hive for the entire four years of it's existence. I don't post as myself frequently, but recently took only about two months off from a portion of my public facing duties to do physical rehab to relearn how to walk. I have never once left or taken any appreciable time away, let alone a year. That's what this post is about- just letting you in a little bit, since I usually do one big update post a year and missed it, so I'm catching up.
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Hello hivelets, one and all! As is my custom, I'm stopping in for a probably thankfully all too rare Crim-centric post. (For those of you counting, we're now about three years late to my last, "wow, home from Iceland- travel log soon!" promise.) This past year took forever and also flew by, which seems to be a hallmark of my time on the blockchain. The more there is to do, the more I miss, and the more time it takes to do the missing the more aware I am of time ticking away. There's probably a lot of very deep human lessons to unpack hidden in that statement, which is also a big recurring theme for me with Hive in general.
I thought since it's been so long, and so much has happened, that I'd try for a year in review style post- looking back at 2023 as a collection of events and achievements, instead of the long written stories I usually default to. My personal photo and travel blog backlog has more than enough of those, and since I'm coming out of such a tough (and great! I'm trying not to focus on the tough bit, since we've all been mired there for so long) year, it's a good time to cheer for what got done too.
I'll preface things by saying that I often take for granted how many of you know me now- through my work here when I was telling stories, through my live streams and entertainment when I was doing those, or through my day to day Hive tasks where I'm sort of tucked away in the background as one of the many cogs that make this place work. I'm never afraid that anyone here "forgets" me, even when I don't post for a year or so, and I try not to take that for granted. On other media, I've not built the same identity, so I'll just catch you all up to a post I made there as the groundwork for looking back at 2023 because I got a lot of messages from people wondering if I'd ghosted.
https://x.com/crimsonclad/status/1747733589104689422?s=20
So yeah, somehow almost a full year ago I was lamenting my reduced posting capacity, the fact that I hadn't done a radio show in a few weeks (which has now extended to literally almost 13 months, congratulations, I played myself), and wrote almost the same thing I thought about writing today. In the interim, life continued to life, I lost another close family member, we have been dealing with the changing aspects of life with a long term terminal illness, and yeah... at the start of this year my literal house ended up partially falling down on my head via an incredibly inconvenient flooding instance. SO. Here we go again, take two. Let's just forget the long stretch of time in between and therefore declare that I did not fail in any of the goals I set, but rather that they were deferred to starting right now. π Very purposeful, you see. Everything as intended! Moisturized by the destructive hand of nature, in my rut lane, flourishing, et cetera.
I'm also using this post as a sort of glimpse into all the random, behind the scenes work for Hive that has become difficult enough and has had a strong enough impact on my life that I am considering making a back-pay proposal for. I recognize that these are a) not an ideal way to do things b) not what I've long term planned to do nor encourage any others going forward to do and c) not great practice as I'd optimally love to lead a charge in seeing the way the DHF is approached changed to a certain degree. I'm just in a really weird space with Hive overall, and it's a good time to prelim talk it out with you, since you're likely to be locked into this post for the next ten mins or however fast it takes you to think "good for you, or sorry that happened, I ain't reading all that tho".
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I take for granted that I am, for the most part, pretty capable. I've been juggling a lot for a long time, and it works, in it's own way. But here I am returning to the keyboard in July, after a pretty big reminder that the universe is much larger than me and despite my indefatigable willpower, I am still just a bag of meat generously arranged on what has turned out to be a traitorous armature.
Early on in the 2010s, a distracted driver rear ended me at a stoplight. She drove my hip up into my socket, shunting my entire body out of alignment and making one of my legs almost two inches shorter than the other. For three years, I went to rehab, physio, and fought a court battle while I relearned how to walk. Powerlifting, competitive sports- you name it- were pretty much fully removed from my life. But I got better! And at the end of it all, I was told, I have some nerve damage and a syndrome in my piriformis muscle that means I will probably have chronic back and hip pain for the rest of my life; so I've just learned how to work around that and assumed that was my "new normal". Unfortunately, accepting and living with a baseline of pain means I've not been able to tell what what has actually been happening inside my body.
Shortly after flying home from Dubai, where I gave a talk and helped MC/moderate most of the conference panels, my leg started getting heavier. Then it started to feel like it was expanding, which is a pretty disconcerting thing when it feels as though your skin is blowing up like a balloon, straining and stretching to the point of bursting... and you look down through tears to see it's completely fucking fine. Doesn't even have the good manners to look at all out of sorts! Shortly thereafter, burning- REAL burning- the most agonizing, excruciating phantom pain I've ever experienced. Doctors immediately determined it wasn't a clot (I've flown long distance enough that I know what to do about and how to avoid those), and I spent the next few days howling wordlessly in agony when I wasn't on a cocktail of opioids.
Then, my entire leg just... stopped working.
I'm not going to lie to you, this was fairly terrifying. I had what was essentially a lifeless hunk of something not me attached to my body. It didn't respond when I asked it move, even though my brain was convinced I was standing on my toes or flexing my calf. I couldn't feel touch or temperature sensations on my skin. Pressure barely registered. Pretty horrific! (Spoiler alert in case you are feeling anxious: It is back and functional again)
I have no intention of turning this post into a medical docudrama, so just take it from me- always ask for imaging if you can get it. It turns out I have severe spinal disc height loss, severe disc bulging, severe lumbar spine degradation, facet joint trauma, and my spine is directly in contact with the nerve roots that control pretty much everything to do with my right leg. One false move, and they could pinch and turn them off like this, or in the future maybe even sever them. With a lot of work and some incredible medical professionals, I've been doing rehab and physio, had some small procedures, and am now on the waiting list for a neurosurgeon for future spinal surgery. But by the time you see me in Croatia for HiveFest, I'll look about as normal as you can expect! For the people who miraculously avoid this post, they hopefully won't know that anything happened, other than I really dropped the ball for a few months this summer on work and comms.
Learning to walk three times in one life I think is enough, I think. It turns out you don't get an achievement for it. BUT there were achievements! Here is a very short list because I'm so over this post already:
Other than the basic day to day stuff of answering emails, pushing social media, working with our projects to provide help, coordinating tech and biz dev liaison work with exchanges, and (unfortunately) often being the doxxed address and credit card on behalf of the Hive ecosystem, we branched out and got a lot done! In the past year or so, up until April 2024 I
β¦οΈ did a record number of X live spaces, video presentations, keynote speeches, and panels- sometimes up to five a week and two a day, or four or more in a single event span! I took the main stage for "special keynote" talk slots four times all over the world, with as much fast and inexpensive travel and a mind for value to the ecosystem as possible. I will maybe slow down a bit in 2025 because in 2023 and 2024 so far I have used up about 95% of my paid vacation time solely on Hive related duties. For someone who has shaped their life around travel, I have missed out on a lot of personal time (by choice!)
β¦οΈ built full a graphic suite and updated "vision" to support immersive displays and tech villages at conferences at more than five major events in four countries; then budgeted, designed, rendered, and oversaw getting it all built as well as handling all of the financing personally and the legal and contract work. I provide these or other custom and motion graphics, photo editing, visual work etc. for free to any project needing them. (The rally car is another of the designs that got a new look this year)
β¦οΈ worked with a number of our dapps and projects to use VP funding to select events, secure spots,then bring our teams to work together as well to connect with outside opportunities that they couldn't do on their own; used their work to showcase what Hive does best while highlighting and supporting what's been built here, and taking care of everything from managing housing and transport to creating and securing marketing items, stage time, and beyond
β¦οΈ secured low priced but high quality legal opinions on HIVE and HBD for multiple locations globally to help us with listing and long term market resiliency
β¦οΈ continue to navigate new listings without paying listing fees- while we're still chasing the "big boys", there are some smaller but vibrant deals ongoing that will hopefully help continue to make our coins more accessible while only covering development overhead, including some already completed tech work for additional fiat on and off ramp channels
β¦οΈ negotiated a bunch of marketing and outreach initiatives including social media and ongoing campaigns with players like Binance, (another of which will be starting hopefully fairly soon), and am working on other partnerships with data aggregators and payment providers to introduce themselves to the community and to work with me and the DHF to create integration and development proposals
β¦οΈ if you know of more, you're welcome to fill in the blank here as you see fit. I suspect I will really struggle with doing the itemized bragging part while writing a proposal when the time comes because I am not really good at this sort of thing. A lot of the time, I am a nag. I nag to help things get done, to help connect people to each other; you name it. Nagging may or may not be a point in the "pros" column, depending on your perspective.
One of my biggest regrets from when I am working on behalf of Hive is that I'm usually so busy that I never even manage to take a photo, and that is sad because we've put on some incredible experiences, have done some really amazing outreach, and have done our best to try to help more people see this ecosystem as one to contend with. Many of them you have seen in other people's posts already, so I don't want to get us too stuck in the weeds over it. If you have a few faves, please drop them in the comments as I'd love to see what I missed while I was chained to a conference booth forgetting to eat π€
You've spearheaded fewer large conference style events for 2024- why?
One thing that we've come to realize is that crypto, even at conferences, is still so new. This sounds like bullshit, but it truly isn't. If you're not at one of the OG nerd parties that have become famous for the lavish spectacle of spending cash to stroke the egos of the people who already "get it", the wider tech world is really just waking up to this space, and is either terrified of it or hoping to find a way to exploit it. We have our work cut out for us, and we have a lot to do. The crypto world lives or dies on who is making the most money most quickly, and people want to hang out where they can make the most in the crab bucket the fastest without thinking about whether they should even be in the bucket.
It can get demoralizing when time and again, building something sustainable or for the "right" reasons with this tech gets overlooked or drops behind another shiny scam that blows up immediately and sets us all a little further back. Right now, it feels like chasing every middle tier conference or trying to buy our way into competing for attention at the biggest ones with oversized sponsorships doesn't feel like quite the right fit. I'm hoping to try to get more invitations to even more speaking engagements that maybe offset or open the doors to reduced cost opportunities- it is VERY easy to get taken for a ride on spending in this space if you're not willing to negotiate and then ultimately say no.
I know especially here, with a social platform built in, we're prone to talking around and past each other. Everyone knows everything about each other, but also nothing. Money works differently when it's transparent, but when there's a disconnect between the platform and the "real world". People operate with passion and dedication for the platform, but also with self preservation in mind, and it's all shaped by the medium of the internet connected message. It's an odd place to try to change the world from. It's an odd place to try to just live in. But it's home, and I love it here. I believe in it and I take lumps when I see where we're failing and where we could do better, and where things just plain "aren't fair". It's the soul of what makes this place STILL ALIVE when hundreds of thousands of other chains and coins and projects couldn't cut it.
Never disbelieve that there's something very real that keeps us alive and moving forwards when there is no guarantee, no VC or founder safety net, and such a vastly diverse set of opinions and experiences all pulling for how to best steer the ecosystem.
I won't lie, this year has been really, really hard. From my personal world to the struggles of taking on the financial burden of others and even this chain at times, and then literally waking up with a quarter of my body paralyzed and now scrambling to make up for the lost time and income and costs of dealing with that, it's easy to let the overall market sentiment and sometimes pretty brutally shitty attitudes around here get me down. The flip side is, there's so much good, here and in the world, and I am an infinitely blessed person who's worked so incredibly hard to make things not just good, but better. I've spent seven years now fully immersed in everything Hive, and I'm still just as wildly enamored with it as I've always been. It's not always as bad as doomscrolling the internet has us believe, so pick a thing that makes you happy, work towards making it better, and make sure you take the time to keep your heart (and your spine!) healthy.
I'll see you guys in Croatia π€
(at some point I will do a real happy anniversary and update post, but I just had to finally get this draft out. Sad thing is, it's not even my oldest π)
