Peon
/ˈpiːən/
A peon is an unskilled laborer, worker, or any person of low social rank who performs menial, tedious, or low-paying tasks.
According to myth the Peony is the work of Zeus, who turned Paeon the physician into a flower to save him, after Paeon's teacher, Asclepius grew jealous of his healing abilities and tried to kill him.
Gods work in mythological ways.
We have a lot of peonies about to bloom in our garden in the next week or so, depending on the weather, and it is going to look great, as long as the rain doesn't spoil the party. They are quite fragile blooms, so a decent rain will smash their structure. However, I was just reading that it is possible to cut them early and store them in the fridge to enjoy the blooms inside later. I will try a few this year, rather than having them all on the bush - since there are hundreds. They have to be harvested at the right time though.
Despite having lived here for years, it always surprises me how much growth there is moving through the spring, where it essentially shifts from a dusty desert, into a lush, green oasis. The garden bed where the majority of our peonies sit, looked like a flat patch of deadness a couple months ago and now the plants are reaching chest high.
Something from seemingly nothing.
I was thinking about this in terms of HIVE price, where obviously at under $0.05 it is pretty depressing for many people. However, while it has been a very long time, stranger things have happened and price recoveries have exceeded expectations.
Currently, a post pay out is only in HIVE, so there is no HBD to be had. Normally at a fifty-fifty split would see half of the pay out to the author converted to HBD. That isn't the case, which has its own economic conditions attached. However, what is interesting is that despite the ridiculously low price of HIVE, things still pretty much function as normal, albeit with a lot less enthusiasm from all quarters. For instance, a $5 post today would have been a $100 post when HIVE was at the equivalent of $1 in value. The same amount of Hive would have come out of the pool in both instances.
Under the same conditions of $1 HIVE, my own measly vote of $1.33 would be worth $26.60, but the same amount of HIVE (~26 HIVE) would be coming out of the pool. While this doesn't really mean much to most people who are selling HIVE at whatever the price, IF (a big if) the price does recover and hit $1, all that earned HIVE will be worth 20x more. That five dollar post value is worth $100 again. The only ones who will miss the value, are those who sold before.
But this is the game of crypto, especially at the moment where the entire market is struggling. And there is no guarantee it will ever recover. It could all go to hell, everything zeroes, and there will be a lot of sad crypto people, and a lot of happy non-crypto people saying "I told you so".
But if it does turn around??
What then?
We have been getting haircut for a long time already, so HBD would start to flow again, but that hasn't been too much of a problem so far perhaps. Not sure, but maybe it is a good thing that people get used to not having HBD. And no, I am not going to get into the conversation here about what a clusterfuck the DHF has become. But, things change. And since we are so depressed now, even "small" changes in price could have a dramatic effect on people's attitudes.
Personally, while I understand why, I don't think we should tie our sense of success to the value of a fluctuating token of any sort. Rather, I reckon people should take some sense of worth from what they actually do in the world, or on Hive rather than the monetary value of the results they get. But, the world is a mess at the moment and there is a huge amount of financial uncertainty in the traditional finance areas also, so is it really any surprise that crypto, which is a bit player in the scale of things, is volatile?
At the end of the day, regardless of what happens, we have to each deal with the life we have, and the decisions we have made to get here. Perhaps there will be people glad they got out, perhaps there will be those glad they stayed. Either way, financially win or lose, it doesn't speak to whether an individual is a good person or not.
Shouldn't that matter?
In the larger game of the economy, We are all just peons.
Taraz
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For me Hive and SPS are both lottery tickets. Do you expect much when you buy a lottery ticket? I don't, but it could be fun...
And I am having fun playing Splinterlands and posting on Hive. Right now there is less competition and easier to build HP on Hive, lets see what the next five years brings and while we wait I will keep stacking the lottery tickets 😀
Lottery tickets have been prohibitively expensive for the past five years. It's better to wait for a sale and buy them for ten times less, for 2-3 cents.
How is it ten times less? Right now Hive is at five cents and regularly dipping to four something so it is like two and a half times cheaper if it gets to 2 cents...
I would like to win the lottery one day. However, you know what I have realised - *I have never heard of a foreigner winning the lottery in Finland. Not one.
Never heard of a foreigner winning the lottery in USA either, I think it is just a game of numbers...
The post can't keep receiving $100 indefinitely. That's too high a price to pay for writing articles every day. This blockchain needs a different value, not writing articles, it needs something else.
Yes, it needs lots of something elses. But, as I see it, it also has to involve personal input rather than automated crap.
These blooming peonies are a perfect reminder that things looking totally dead can still grow back if given enough time.
You are completely right that even with low token prices the platform still functions normally for building our future stakes.
It is a great wake-up call to never let our personal self-worth get tied up in volatile crypto market charts.
We just need to stay patient need to keep our heads down and focus on real life instead of stressing over numbers... Numbers can change on every second...
And the number we focus on, are the wrong ones.
Everything regenerates, grows back or bounce back as domething new. Hive is no different but focus must be on the underlying value provided the token merely accounts for the value but the production has to be taken care of.
Good day
The underlying value of participation can be high - but most people don't care for that kind of value.
I think it is a very deep philosophical reflection that uses nature cycles to give financial hope
Didn’t know peonies came from Zeus saving a healer from Asclepius. What a story.
Your garden turning from dusty desert to green oasis after rain is beautiful. Nature really does bloom from nothing.
I don’t get crypto or HIVE much, but I felt the part about value not being just money.
Sometimes growth you can see like peonies about to bloom matters more than price.
Thanks for sharing this. Made me think about patience and healing.