Investment or Ideology? Can the Hive Blockchain Have Both?

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Imagine for a minute, your investment in Bitcoin, or Gold, stocks and shares or whatever our investment vehicle begins to rise in value.

You watch day by day or even second by second as the price creeps up, and along with it, our profit. 10%, 20%, 30%, you're in the money and finally, you can wait no longer. You decide that the price has peaked or you have hit your target profit and you rush out and sell. Instant profit, Cash in hand ready to spend or reinvest......

Let's now imagine the price of Hive starts rocketing. It's on its way to the moon. You've waited a long time for this. OMG its hit $1....and finally, you can wait no longer. You decide the price has peaked or you have hit your target profit and you rush out and sell hit the powerdown button and in 7 days you have 1/13th of your stash available to sell, but by this time, the price has dumped to 90cents, and the week after that when you have another 1/13th available, its dropped even further at 60cents. The following week it's actually less than it was when the price increase began......

However. Many people who don't actually give a damn about communities or the whole Hive blockchain and its ethos have profited handsomely. They were holding Hive as liquid, either on exchanges or in offline wallets. They weren't staking and rode the wave, making vast profits on the way. They had never posted the pictures of their drunken adventures whilst riding a llama in Peru or poured out their heart whilst sharing the mental anguish of the loss of their beloved pet kangaroo.

No, they had swapped some other tokens for some Hive tokens as a speculative investment and are reaping the benefits whilst the rest of us sit and watch, hopelessly hog-tied as we wait seven long days for our proudly hodled 100K of Hive to kindly release 1/13th of it into our grasp......

Obviously there are many 'investors' on the blockchain for whom this is acceptable. As usual, on the first of the month, well-rewarded stories abound of proud members who have bought and staked more Hive. I, with my limited IQ, find this puzzling. Particularly from an investment point of view. It appears to me, more like buying endless lottery tickets and hoping for that one big win, however long it takes and which may or may not come. Scattergun approaches to investing are hardly wise.

Meanwhile....

The calls for marketing grow ever stronger. I even read something this week about Goats???!!! and if anyone actually bothers to respond to this simpletons' ramble, I will no doubt hear the words once more;

Instead of whinging, what are you doing to bring in new people?

Well, I've chatted to many people over the last few years, all of whom return a similar response, namely, that's it's all far too complicated and why would they tie up money that they may not be able to afford for such a long period in a wildly volatile investment vehicle?

The premise of HIve is that its social media rewarded....or its a decentralised, censorship-resistant media platform....or it's an investment platform or.....

Hive needs to define itself and split again if necessary. There are those who want mass adoption and emphasise the 'reward' aspect and then complain about people just wanting to make money here! I have also read a number of posts about how to make money from Hive and the best way to increase your passive income with tips and strategies and spreadsheets glorifying their own progress in 'making money'. Content creators moaning they're not rewarded well-enough for their work, other content creators moaning they're better than other content creators who earn more than them.....

It's all about the money, which is fine if that's why you're here. Of course, its just money making money like any traditional financial system, hardly the groundbreaking 'change-the-world' world financial revolution. People with real, often well paid traditional jobs who post here and 'invest' here with the safety net of a comfortable middle-class western lifestyle, knowing that if their investment is lost, it's not such a big deal. Hardly the stuff of revolution is it?

Then we have the puritans who crave the decentralised, libertarian nature of the chain with its absolute protection from censorship and it's carved in granite, immutable ledger of transactions.

I question whether Hive's woes and lack of use is all down to this attempt to be all things to all people. Perhaps we need two chains. One for the decentralised and censorship media content that's reward purely on a voluntary basis using a similar model to Patreon and another chain for the 'earner' content creators who sole aim is to make a profit and play the numbers game. I really don't see how these two main ideals can co-exist in one successful blockchain unless people see the difference between the blockchain and the applications that run on it and provide absolute separation of the two. This won't happen unless there is also the separation of blockchain governance and all DApps that run upon it, including Hive. Giving the same name to the blockchain and its main user interface was a huge error in my opinion.

The other huge thing we must do is reduce the power-down time to 4 weeks, or two weeks if possible. We need new users and we need people buying Hive as a practical investment. The arguments will sally forth that this can encourage game-players and increase the risk of shit and often plagiarized or copy/paste content but my answer to this is; as a decentralised community, is it not up to the community to police and deal with this themselves? If not, then we have only ourselves to blame.

Finally, dump the reward system. Rewards should be made voluntarily and by tip or patronisation only. Curation rewards? None. If content is to be rewarded, it should be simply that. A reward, payment by the person who consumed the work if they deem it of value to them. 'Content creators' would be up in arms, but most of them don't earn anything from posting anywhere else and it might increase the quality as they push to get better. People on auto-voters who are guaranteed an income hardly have the motivation to push hard to achieve more as we can see already!

I Just think, throwing money at marketing is folly, as it was throwing all that money at an attempt to get listed on more exchanges.

Encourage the developers first, get the products here and people will come to use them, no matter their ideologies. Then, perhaps we can create a space that truly can be all things to all people!

AND PLEASE. STOP REFERENCING THE NAMES OF DAPPS TO THE NAME OF THE BLOCKCHAIN. CHANGE HIVE.BLOG TO SOMETHING ELSE.

POINTLESS RAMBLE OVER........

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta