According to Google Trends the interest in ‘passive income’ more than tripled over the past five years.

And while the crypto savvy are caught up in the DeFi and NFT craze the regular bourgeois in their thirties is getting excited about the FIRE movement.

Let me tell you, my Google feed is exploding with tips on how to get money without working. Most of them don’t hold up to their promises, though, for two major reasons.

Passive Income from Investments (Yes, DeFi belongs to this)

“Put money into this project and get awesome returns.”, we all know the slogan and people chanting it feel like they just invented loans and interest. I mean come on. People have been lending money for interest for centuries now.

None of these awesome investment opportunities are anything else, once you crunch them down. Interest from your bank account (= lending money to the bank), dividends from your stock account (= lending money to the company), interest from your DeFi project (= lending money to the liquidity pool). Yes, we have several different sorts of risks and levels of involvement but in the end it all comes down to one thing: You need to have money before you can invest money. And how do you get that money? From working, which is active income.

Once you have achieved a level on which your payouts have broken even your investment, you are getting truly passive income, but the least of people achieve that.

Passive Income from Blogging and Influencing

I don’t even read these articles anymore in which successful bloggers describe their way to financial independence. They’re making 2000 bucks a month from blogging and don’t have to work? Sounds great! Except for what happens when they, as sole contributor to their blogs, stop producing content or maintaining their profiles.

How exactly is that passive income? Most people would probably make more money with a ‘proper’ job rather than spending their time on social media.

The Problem with HIVE

On HIVE you can earn money from staking rewards (the first type of ‘passive income’) or from blogging (the second type of ‘passive income’). Well, there are other ways, but let’s keep it simple for now. But the blogging aspect takes the restriction described above to a whole new level.

You can only earn from your post for 7 days. If you write the neatest of tutorials and people find it through Google on day 8, well, pity, you won’t get anything for that. HIVE requires constant activity to generate rewards for your newest content and let me tell you, it’s not worth it from a financial point of view.

My articles usually take 1-2 hours to write and compose and end up being curated with $0.02-0.06 from which half of it goes to the curators. This does not even pay for the electricity spent writing this, let alone for any work put into it.

People are eager to find ways of earning a passive income and believe that blogging is one of those, but HIVE is currently not using this to its advantage.

Many newcomers give up on writing after having been demystified with their first couple of posts. Even if they continued growing their base of followers they would not earn anything with their previous posts anymore.

Sure, on PeakD you have the option to send a tip. But who does that, really? That’s spending my own money to tip someone else. I may have liked their article but did I like it that much?

Real Passive Income

‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! is the most successful Christmas single of all time in Germany, charting every year since 1997.

This is the kind of passive income I am talking about! Produce content that earns you active income and keep profiting from it again and again and again… as passive income.

Recently, I have joined Publish0x and I amazed by the possibility to have readers tip my articles for free without a 7 day window closing after the publishing date.

Did I earn more than on HIVE? Not really, but on Publish0x I feel that growing my follower base may also trigger income on older posts, especially if those are referenced in the newer ones.

It combines a great aspect of HIVE (not having to actively maintain my own blogging website) with an unexpiring earning opportunity.

What can Hive do?

Changing the current payout system in a way that allows curating after 7 days would be a fundamental change for HIVE. From what I understand, part of the immutability on HIVE comes from the fact that posts older than 7 days are frozen on the blockchain, including curation. We must not lose this immutability which really is HIVE’s USP.

Still, HIVE should come up with a solution if it wants to attract a crowd of new content creators who are right now surfing the web, looking for ways to retire early.

They could for instance, create a 2nd layer solution that pays with a different token and that can be distributed even after the 7 day period. We have a sh*tload of tribe tokens no-one is using but everybody seems to love, so a third ‘official’ coin in addition to HIVE and HBD, would certainly not hurt anyone.

Can you come up with any other proposals? Share them in the comments and don’t forget to create new content, forging your own ‘Last Christmas’ asset.

Disclaimer: No financial advice included in this article. Just sharing my personal experience and thoughts. Do your own research!

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Images courtesy of Unsplash.com or taken from Google Trends.

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