Been a while since I did one of these freewrites. The kind of freewrites that @kommienezuspadt and @edicted like and do themselves, the kind of write-ups that require a lot of inspiration and actually having the mindset to be able to write non-stop, no editing allowed, and still be able to put out a post that is worth hitting the button publish.
I think I used to do one of these write ups every 3-4 days for around a year back in 2019. I used to be a prolific writer of miscellaneous shit and vomit all my thoughts into a post. I used to have two methods, the first one was to go somewhere outside with my pen and paper notebook - yeah, fuck Mac and their notebooks, I can't believe I had to clarify I use a paper notebook because nowadays you mention that word and everyone thinks you're talking about the overpriced, underperforming laptops - and the write about anything and everything that came to my mind and then I would transcribe to a Hive post whatever - and however - I wrote. The other method was to directly write on my cellphone or my laptop, which was definitely an easier method in terms of writing but way more complicated because of the inspiration part.
I realized I hadn't done a freewriting thoughts from a X kind of post for a while, perhaps even more than a year now, and seeing @bozz's latest post I decided to give it a go one more time.
I always say that writing helps you get your thoughts in a row and to organize how you think and feel at the moment. I not only write for Hive, I also write for myself - although I always try to spin my writings into a post because well, let's mine Hive right? Thanks DPoS and PoB. The fact is, writing on a daily basis is probably one of the best habits I've developed and it is definitely the first advice I give to young people that end up asking me what do I do to be profficient and efficient in my life.
Writing changes your mindset and it hardwires your brain into being able to transmit your thoughts by being as clear as possible, and if you are able to put down into words whatever you want to achieve, how you think about a topic, and what is your stance regarding any concept, then you are golden, because most people just wander around in life because they don't even have clarity and focus because well, they don't even know themselves.
Building on Hive
A couple of days ago @l337m45732 wrote to me with an idea for a dapp which we are definitely going to try to develop if we ever find the right tools and the proper help. If this was 2019 or maybe even 2020 I would've never doubted about building it on Hive, you know, free transactions, big community, huge support, yada yada.
But to be completely honest, three days ago once I began thinking about how the project development and roadmap would go down, I became hesitant about the whole yeah, hive is definitely the place to build a dapp, it is a no-brainer!.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I am convinced that Hive is definitely the best blockchain to build a dapp on top of, especially since smart contracts are a thing now - for a while now, I know - even if they live on a layer2 dapp, and since @themarkymark developed his @hivepunks idea I am convinced that NFTs can definitely be a thing on Hive.
So when it comes to infra and tech, Hive provides pretty much everything you would need to build any kind of dapp, all you'd need is the knowledge.
My issue is the Hive community.
Now, before you jump on me for the statement above, let me share my thoughts and you are more than welcome to attack me afterwards.
One of the main arguments for building on Hive is the community, and I get that argument. We have a big, solid community with many members that will support almost any project built on Hive that shows potential and has good foundations. People like @yabapmatt and @themarkymark lead the way when it comes to supporting a Hive project with their wallet, or at least that's what I've seen in the past. We have minnows interested in everything that comes out on hive and they tackle the social media side, creating free marketing for any project that builds a name for itself on Hive, and it is almost guaranteed to get some noise both in and outside of Hive.
In theory, this sounds amazing, right? You have two very important parts of the equation covered just by building on hive.
We have the perfect and most recent example with WOO and their recent launch. A solid project with amazing foundations and lots of building behind sold out their Alpha pack sale in 90~ seconds. And we also have another great example, Splinterlands is born and raised on Hive and it is currently the biggest blockchain based gaming dapp out there, and it wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the awesome hive community.
My issue, and it is probably something I contributed to in the past back when Steem was a perfect place for content creators to thrive and make a living out of creating awesome content, is that a big chunk of the Hive community doesn't understand the concept of long term holding and not selling to push price momentum. These community members - which are a lot - are just here to make a quick buck, perhaps make a living for a while, and then move on when things go south or their post rewards don't hold to their own baseless expectations.
They don't have skin in the game, they never invested in the Hive token - they invested their time, of course - but in reality they don't have their own irl- generated money, for them everything generated on Hive is extra income for the short term winters.
The concept of being a full time hiver is still too strong and engraved in some parts of the overall hive community. While smaller than before, the idea of hive being a primary source of income still plays a big role in the mindset of many, many community members.
In fact I talk a lot more in-depth about this topic here
We saw this mindset take place right after the WOO launch and the price action it got before and after the alpha pack sale.
It would seem like whenever some Hive users see a small gain in one of the layer2 dapps, the first thing they think of is to sell, materialize those gains, and move their funds over to hive just so that when a small Hive pump comes, they can make another 10%-20% profit on top of their previous layer2 10%-15% profit.
I get the mindset, a 30%-40% profit is amazing, especially if you generated that income by blogging on hive. In fact, some people could argue it was a 130% profit because you didn't invest any fiat to get that original 100% you used to buy a layer2 token.
It came to my mind that perhaps it is our own fault that Hive hasn't mooned yet, because there is too much sell pressure and at the very moment the hive price starts to pump and the volume becomes bullish, instead of pushing this momentum and maybe establish a higher price floor, a lot of us put more sell pressure to the charts.
Again, nothing wrong with that, we gotta do what we gotta do, and some people are fine with a short term 30% gain instead of a 10x long-term profit. That's fine.
But perhaps it is not the kind of mentality one would like for their own layer2 project's community to have, is it?
The thing with Hive that makes it so different to any other blockchain project out there and therefore is an option for layer2 projects built on Hive, is that it allows users to stack the native token without having to invest a dime from their own pocket. We invest our time and effort, we grind the community, we engage, we make hive a great place for content creation and content consumption and the tokenomics reward us with hive tokens in exchange for this.
But in theory, and as far as I understand the tokenomics, this model doesn't work if we don't materialize the new users' crypto wallets, making them experience the whole UI, the dapps, the communities, and then encourage them to invest in Hive tokens because they believe in the long term potential of the token, the community and the blockchain.
We fail at converting newbies into investors. We succeed at converting newbies into into content creators that mine Hive through content until they don't receive enough rewards. Then they power down and leave without ever having skin in the game like @tarazkp likes to say. They have nothing to lose and everything to win, so for them there is no downside other than wasting a few hours a week trying to grind the reward pool, if it works, great, if it doesn't, off to grind another play2earn, move2earn, read2earn or whatever2earn blockchain dapp out there.
A big part of the hive user base lacks long term mindset.
If you don't believe me, take a look at how many accounts there are on hive and how many of them are still active, and how many of them go back to 2016-17. You'll be baffled, dazed and confused. I also don't get why people don't stick with Hive in the long term.
I don't get it, Hive has so much potential and yet, we fail to convert newbies into investors, we fail to make long-term users out of short-term rookies trying out a new thing. We don't have new money coming in but we do have a lot of money waiting for X price range to go out. The sell pressure is too much and the eagerness and anxiety of short term holders with no skin in the game is in my opinion too much. The cultural mindset of many community members is to make a quick buck, a short term profit and be at peace.
We don't allow the hive price to explode
This doesn't mean that @l337m45732 and I have decided not to build our dapp on top of hive, it just means that we have to come up with a different dynamic and tokenomics basis that allows only the type of users we want to be holders of the native token to actually be able to buy in early and to grind the dapp PoB model.
There are countless projects out there that use whitelists, some others require the userbase to grind to certain level or to do something specific in order to be able to buy the token. There are so many options out there that we can benchmark, but we are convinced that the current model layer2 tokenized dapps use on hive is probably not the best.
To be completely honest I have no idea how to do it, we still have to think more in-depth about this topic.
There's a huge part of the Hive community that is incredibly based and has an amazing long-term mindset. Those are the kind of holders you want for your project, those are the ones that have diamond hands and will not add sell pressure to every single 5% price pump. The kind of users that actually put in their own money into a project to show their support with their wallet, and actually want to see a project succeed in five years for a 100x profit instead of pump in 5 days for a 10% profit.
The Hive community is great
Just not all of it.
Like on every project out there, there are long term thinkers and short term profiters, and if any project built on top of Hive wants to become the next splinterlands, it has to leverage the first group of Hive users and attract those HODL wallets.
It's funny, a friend of mine is involved in another non-hive crypto project and one of the first things the founder mentioned to him was "If you ever want to sell before X date, let me know and I'll find a way to buy you out, just don't let your tokens hit the market". Damn, if that is not based and knowing the market and the crypto momentum, then I don't know what is.
You know why? Because when the very same userbase that helped you launch a successful project also help kill any positive price action, they are also actively killing the project they helped build with their funds. Momentum is important as fuck in crypto especially because the crypto-timelines are way shorter than normal timelines. Six months in crypto feel like 10 years in stocks, so killing every single positive price action and letting momentum fade off with sell pressure is definitely not something you want for a crypto project.
What good would it do if a project invests money on marketing and hype if the current user base will kill off any momentum the outside money brings, and how will the long term chart will look for an outside investor?
Yikes, every time this token wants to pump, the current holders take much more profit than the volume generated by new buy orders that funnel money into the project. The current userbase is not letting the price go up. I think I will pass on this investment opportunity.
And then we wonder why there's no outside money coming to hive and why we've crabbed below $1 for ages - that short pump to $3 could have been the beginning of something amazing, but the sell pressure got the best out of it. There were too many users holding for a long time waiting for a >$1 price to sell and well, we went all the way down to sub $1 when we could've established a new price floor way above $1, but such is life.
Anyway, I am rambling too much now.
The point is, building on Hive is one of the best options out there, and in my opinion, if a project manages to attract the long term investors that have roamed hive for so long and have a better understanding of Crypto projects and diamond hands, then the project will be golden. If the project fails to leverage this part of the hive community that has no match in the whole cryptospace, then I believe it will fail, or just crab forever.
I might be wrong, you might call me stupid, you might agree with me. Whatever it is, I am open to have my mind changed and I'm willing to look at your side of the token. Perhaps even having a discussion about this shows me and @l337m45732 the right way to leverage the hive community for that project we have in mind.
Some people view themselves as "small", which is ridiculous. Accounts intentionally stay "small". The "small" people with their "small" accounts expect special treatment, which is ridiculous. Then when things go wrong or aren't quite easy enough, they'll blame all the people making sacrifices and doing their best as individuals to help keep everything afloat, for the "problems" they have. Some that view themselves as "small" (again, that's an f'n ridiculous mindset to have, carry, and maintain) will even start treating others like shit and mocking them for putting the time, effort, and resources in while still having something to show for it.
And don't get me started on the tantrums and months long smear campaigns some of these "small" minds construct after not getting their way. That's just far too annoying to think about...
So that sucks. Noticed a lot of the projects over the years focus internally on the existing market/community and rarely do much to promote their product outside in order to bring new money in to their project and Hive as a whole. All these individual projects should be marketing themselves independently, externally, rather than sitting around waiting for Hive to magically market itself somehow and bring new money to all projects. That's like a department store doing all the marketing for each product on their shelves and the products doing nothing but waiting for a handout to fall from the sky, or something.
Whatever. Who cares...
Crypto is just money and many of the products on Hive appeal to consumers in general, that have money. Far too much emphasis is placed on the crypto aspect or a token, rather than what the product offers on the surface level, which is what people outside of crypto would be more interested in spending their money on. Trying to sell games to crypto investors rather than gamers, for instance, shrinks potential interest in the product by quite a bit. Someone wants to be a gamer but instead shows up and is being converted into an investor. Kind of like inviting someone to see a movie, then telling them they have to be an actor in order to enjoy it.
Decentralized and permissionless. That means everyone is in charge of themselves and that's it. Requires more thinking outside the box, depending less on others; doing things yourself. Guiding your own success story and blaming yourself when things go wrong. Something like that...
Arts/entertainment/information; media. That attracted the crowds over the years. The actual people. But there was always a shortage of consumers, especially paying consumers in general. People were encouraged to get paid to look away, for an ROI, causing a negative feedback loop. A million tokens for a million things and all the little intricacies that don't come naturally to most along with too much focus on investing/finance; community started to stagnate.
Now I'm rambling...
I think you are way off-base with some of your assumptions here.
You're basically saying you want Hive to be centralized with price controls and a market maker that controls everything. That doesn't lead to more value being built: it leads to an even bigger pump and dump and even more people losing everything, getting pissed, and rage quitting.
Imagine everyone got paid, not in USD, but the stock of the company they worked for. Imagine bosses running around the company telling employees they shouldn't sell their stock for USD because that "hurts the company". See how ridiculous that is? This is the argument you are making.
If you want to make the argument that Hive is paying its 'employees' too much for the work they do, it could be a valid argument; we could explore that further. However ultimately this doesn't mean we should reduce the reward pool, but rather build out the infrastructure that makes our 'employees' more valuable. With the recent AI advancement we may find that the bar for development has been lowered to the floor and users can simply hop over it.
We are starting to realize that besides Bitcoin, Hive is seemingly the only decentralized network out there. Everything else is a centralized hunk of shit unilaterally controlled by the dev team and/or venture capital. We can not compare Hive to any other network (not even Bitcoin because Hive and Bitcoin are so different).
Who is this person that sees Hive go x36 from 10 cents to $3.60 and thinks, "Hm, that's not enough, it should have done even better!" Hive has gone x5 against Bitcoin in the last two years. People who are coming at it with an infinite-greed don't have a valid opinion. I'd ask if there is some other project we should be looking at as a template for how we can do better, but there isn't because we can't compare Hive to anything out there (certainly nothing that was created in the last few years).
The reason no new money came into Hive is that everyone was greedy as shit and invested in the shiny new thing like they always do. They put their money into NFTs, DEFI, and FTX. Now they are flat broke and have nothing left to invest with. This is not a Hive problem. It's a greed problem.
The only way to fix this is keep grinding and force people to recognize this chain as legitimate, despite being constantly ignored when when the given topic is crypto social media, stable coins, on-chain fee sustainability, security & account-recovery, and all the other things we've been doing for years with zero recognition. Punishing people for selling their wages into a spendable currency will not have a positive affect.
Again, I'd like to talk to this person who thinks Hive should have defied the market and not peaked when literally everything peaked and should not have crashed when literally everything crashed. That's so intensely delusional. What were their other investments? Clearly in my mind, they've lost everything.
Ah well this post-comment is already x3 too long. None of this was meant to be harsh, but I'm sure it comes off that way. I find it quite frustrating, because in the infant stages of crypto there is an infinite amount of growth when looking at the outside, but many seek to penny pinch within the small ecosystem we've created. This is macro-thinking time, not micro efficiency improvement. By the time we expand to a reasonable size our micro-problems are going to be completely different.
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Good points. I have seen such a behavior often. Many people here are even proud of growing their account fully by content creation, without even a single Hive actually bought. Others in principle use the 50% HBD part to immediately cash out.
Great idea to specifically incentivize long term holding.
Yeah, I think a lot of people feel that way. I have never powered down, and even though I can see a day where I might, it would never be my full stake. If anything it would just be post rewards here and there so I can supplement my income. Why would you power down your stake that is literally earning you money. It's silly to me. I think part of the reason people are so quick to dump airdropped tokens is because we have seen so many of them fail. I think if we had more successes, people might be more likely to hold them. Those successes come with time and patience though and most people aren't willing to wait that long. Writing has become and outlet for me as well. I do it just as much for myself as I do for my readers and the upvotes.
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This is human nature, even more so when you get something for free.