Good day, fellow Hive users! I hope you're all doing well.
As we all know, witnesses are the backbone of the Hive platform—the unsung heroes who ensure everything runs smoothly. They operate critical nodes that keep the platform alive and thriving. Without witnesses, Hive wouldn’t exist, and without us, there would be no content to share and engage with.
That's why I've created this special edition of "Meet Our Hive Witnesses."
This interview series aims to connect with our witnesses, giving you a closer look at the people who keep Hive running. We’ll dive into their work, motivations, and insights through a series of thoughtful questions.
In this episode, we’re excited to introduce our first witness interviewee, a seasoned witness and developer who goes by the name @KLYE
Read on to discover their unique perspective and learn more about the vital role they play in our community.
@dhavey1~It's a great honor conversing with a hardworking witness like you on this first very episode of meet our Hive witness interview Edition 1 @KLYE
• Thanks @dhavey1
#1
Q: Do you think Hive is prepared to handle a massive influx of users? If not, what areas need improvement to scale efficiently?
A:
As it sits now, I see no reason why HIVE and the front ends such as hive.blog or peakd.com couldn't handle more users. As far as API calls go, the hardware and connection requirements are nothing insane.
From the last time I was looking at active daily stats, we were hovering around 1,100 daily active posters. In our STEEM most popular times, we had well over 100x or more than that, just to put our current network load compared to peak load into perspective.
What percent of those are LLM bots shitposting GPT accounts' garbage is hard to say. I briefly considered making a script to do this and open-sourcing it, but I already have a disdain for what I consider valueless information shovelled into the chain in hopes of profit.
#2
Q: What are the technical bottlenecks Hive faces today, and how are they being addressed?
A:
Hive is based on a now archeotech/ancient blockchain technology called Graphene, which is effectively a decade-old blockchain technology at this point, released around June 2015, maybe slightly later.
There have been a number of witness server infrastructure soft forks over the years, but as far as user-facing improvements, we've not really seen any implementation or seizure of capability potential, as far as I have seen.
The code exists out there to upgrade the HIVE blockchain to be proper smart contract capable/modern blockchain. I do not think the long-term improvement of HIVE was ever even planned by the core devs; it may have been a product built to sell to another firm.
I do not foresee this layer one smart contract execution ability coming as a Hive blockchain improvement added into the core application anytime soon, sadly. It will almost certainly be a side chain developed to achieve this, as those capable either do not due to the effort required or because there is no real incentive for those not being paid a large amount for Hive dev to do it.
#3
Q: How can Hive position itself as a leader in Web3 technologies?
A:
Web3, in my opinion, was a marketing hype terminology used to label decentralized networks capable of decentralized computation. HIVE/STEEM/Bitshares/Graphene chains don't really have the capability of network-level decentralized computing.
Staple Web3 technologies simply put have never been available on these Graphene chains in the way HIVE is built, due to the fact they are basically just a Decentralized RocksDB database running pre-compiled scripts to do datatype filtering.
Dan Larimer’s "EOS" chain is what a Graphene-based chain would look like with a decentralized "virtual machine"/computation/smart contract ability baked in. And while clunky, it enables what I consider true "Web3" to be.
Keep in mind, Web3 is effectively a marketing term with "hype" behind it, much like chip fabs measured in "x nm (nanometer)" are bullshit at this point, and how the ".com", "AI," and "tulip" bubbles produced a massive influx of capital followed by a crash of said investments in them.
Look at Ethereum, which, in my opinion, was the first "modern" blockchain and set the standard for the absolute bare minimum a blockchain needs to be interoperable—being programmable and capable of computation and storage. Hive is not.
#4
Q: How can Layer 2 solutions be utilized to expand Hive’s functionality?
A:
The one redeeming quality of the Graphene-based chains is the "free transactions" nature of them. This can be leveraged in immense means using the HIVE/STEEM/Graphene chains as a "source of truth"—an immutable database.
Look at the Splinterlands game spamming HIVE "custom_json" operations on the HIVE blockchain to effectively provide a record and entry point of their layer 2 interactions. Something like 70% of operations on HIVE at one point were Splinterlands writing actions to the chain.
I do have a proper Web3 side chain under development (for what feels like god damn forever now, but I had to go into coding in medical software because unless you're one in the good graces of the top 20, you effectively develop for free) for HIVE that will allow us to become truly interoperable by transplanting the Ethereum EVM smart contract computation ability into a Hive side chain.
If all goes well, it should be running by end of summer (hopefully, my workload is fucked right now), which will allow us to not only build proper HIVE-to-EVM style chain bridges but also use our HIVE to run, interact, and deploy true smart contract capability.
The Hive-Engine side chain uses a Javascript virtual machine that runs in tandem on the witness computers parsing out Base64 encoded Javascript. While capable, at the end of the day, it isn’t much more than Merkle tree/cryptographically hash-checked bunch of servers running in tandem and using deterministic cryptography to ensure all the witnesses are on the same page, so to speak.
There are some serious security implications (remote code execution may be possible on HE witness systems) with their current implementation, but the fix would require a massive refactor. And while I'd love to refactor it to make it safe for witnesses to run, simply put the incentive is not there.. HE witnesses in top wo make like $3 a day.. That doesn't pay for the level of software engineering required to fix it.
#5
Q: How important is interoperability between Hive and other blockchain networks, and what steps should the community take in that direction?
A:
Interoperability is far from a buzzword.
It effectively allows what otherwise would be a "closed community" island of a blockchain into something capable of taking assets from HIVE and its side chains and "wrapping" them using graphene/EVM bridges to be used on other chains like Ethereum.
There are many valid methods to achieve cross-chain asset interoperability...
But as of the time of writing this, HIVE lacks the inbuilt ability to do this and ultimately requires a daemon (background program) to be run on a centralized server to detect and facilitate swaps.
Once I've got the EVM-capable Hive Side Chain going, this SHOULD allow the capability to fix this.
#6
Q: What are your thoughts on integrating AI tools to improve user experience and community engagement?
A:
Slippery fucking slope there..!
While I briefly looked into developing a multi-agent AI/LLM/GPT detection agent to monitor all posts and blogs on the chain, I was never able to get false positives under the 1% mark, making me leery to deploy it.
The AIDAH account may eventually monitor for LLM/GPT garbage...
But yeah, stuff like AI image generation I have little issue with.
But I know for a fact that a lot of the shitposting we see on HIVE is automated, no human-in-the-loop AI/GPT/LLM trash posts.
Not to say I find most of the HIVE blog posts useful or even worth the space they take up on the chain, but that is my own objective observation—perhaps others value makeup tutorials and food reviews more than I do. lol
The lack of ability to filter out obvious AI-generated trash posts and self-upvote rings incentivizes people to automate posts and vote on themselves, hoping to catch the vote of others.
HIVE is highly gameable in this sense.
#7
Q: What are the technical bottlenecks Hive faces today, and how are they being addressed?
A:
As it sits, the chain itself hasn't had a considerable technology upgrade since the implementation of the MIRA/RocksDB data storage method on the witness servers—which vastly sped up syncing nodes by breaking away from strictly single-threaded block verification and moving to batch/multi-thread capable syncing.
It used to take well over a WEEK to sync a witness server, and several weeks to sync a HIVE node with all the API plugins enabled—now it takes a few days, a significant quality of life / software infrastructure upgrade.
But as far as user-facing upgrades, there really hasn’t been any, and a near majority of the Top 20 Witnesses are content to profit while only a few actively work on updates.
The fact that HIVE has had over 26 versions of soft/hard forks since its launch, yet nobody in the top positions has attempted to modernize or build a proper EVM-compatible plugin is disturbing to me. Unfortunately, calling out the Top 20 for not doing much (though a few are active in patches) feels pointless when they own enough stake to effectively govern who remains in the Top 20 / in favor—which kind of sucks.
I understand that people in power and profiting from their positions will always try to keep that income and power, but it’s led to stagnation in development and gatekeeping of the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF / @hbd.fund).
If the grandfathered Bitshares guys from Dan Larimer’s era don’t like you, you’ll never receive funding to develop anything. In my case, I called this out years ago and fell out of favor—because people in power don’t like being called parasites who make more money than value they provide to the Hive dev community.
At the end of the day, people are people and will almost ALWAYS do the least amount of effort for the most amount of return.
Calling this out isn’t meant to call the guys doing this complete pieces of shit—it’s human nature, and I understand why they do it; most would do the same in their position.
In the case of the HIVE large stakeholders, the DPoS design itself incentivizes this profiteering and lack of motivation to develop state.
#8
Q: What innovations or updates do you think Hive should prioritize to remain competitive with other blockchain-based platforms?
A:
As mentioned above, we’re still basically our own little island of what is effectively not even modern crypto.
The lack of on-chain distributed computing and smart contract execution is the reason we’re not a top 20 market cap coin. We do not possess the minimum basics of a smart contract-capable “Web3” chain as it stands.
Simply put, under the hood, the graphene-based chains like HIVE are running decade-old tech that isn’t compatible with current standards of interoperable chains natively.
I am working on fixing this with a side chain that will use the native HIVE token to power EVM smart contract functionality... But there are a number of technical hurdles to overcome before this can be achieved.
The idea is to use HIVE as “gas” like ETH, which would be distributed amongst the witnesses running nodes...
But until then, we’re not really attractive—we’re a small community with a mere fraction of the active users we had in the STEEM hype days.
It’s kind of sad... But it is what it is.
We’re not competitive or attractive in terms of technology and chain governance is concerned.
#9
Q: How can Hive position itself as a more eco-friendly blockchain?
A:
The computation power needed to run the Hive blockchain and the electricity used is actually pretty minimal!
Less than 10 kW, in my opinion..!
We’re actually incredibly eco-friendly compared to a Proof of Work (PoW) chain like BTC.
In theory, the entire HIVE witness node infrastructure could be run on 21 servers using $400 old-generation Intel servers at a cost of maybe $30 of electricity a month.
For less than $10,000 USD, you could set up a graphene DPoS chain with all witnesses running their own dedicated machines. Of that $10,000, less than $800 would be the electricity cost per year, and the rest would cover dedicated hardware costs.
That said, larger, more powerful servers are needed to create reliable API endpoints to interact with HIVE without requiring users to run their own HIVE node.
All in all, the DPoS model and the lack of specialized PoW mining machines allow the core blockchain of HIVE to be run at a cost of less than $1,000 worth of electricity a year.
#10
Q: What steps are being taken to ensure Hive’s relevance in a rapidly evolving blockchain space?
A:
As far as I can see, beyond the odd HIVE developer here or there trying to make meaningful improvements via side chains and the few actually active Top 20 witnesses (maybe half of those guys are active devs, the rest are too entrenched and not able to be voted out due to their stake, so they have little incentive to change anything or work on blockchain improvements) doing soft/hard fork patches, we really haven't seen much for user-facing upgrades.
Shortly after I announced my EVM sidechain project, I remember Blocktrades mentioning he was working on the same thing for the main chain, with something like 20 devs working on it... This was three years ago. Interpret that as you will.
To be fair, Blocktrades/Dan Notestein isn’t a bad dude at all—he sometimes takes steps to benefit blockchain users, but he’s effectively the gatekeeper who determines who is supported by the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF / @hbd.fund) and who gets Top 20 spots.
There is no incentive for the "old boys club"—those who were there from the start of STEEM—to act as witnesses and do much, so they don’t.
On the flip side, guys like howo (and plenty of other good devs in the Top 20) are very active devs for the HIVE blockchain, and I think howo deserves all the profits he gets as he’s been actively contributing.
It boils down to how DPoS chains like HIVE effectively lack incentives for those with the largest stakes to do much—there’s no penalty for being inactive in HIVE blockchain dev because the "old boys club" can keep each other voted in and veto the entire rest of the community holdings with their votes.
#11
Q: What security measures are currently in place to protect Hive from attacks, and how can they be enhanced?
A:
The Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism, security-wise, for lack of a better term, is a horrible joke and a delusion to anyone thinking it’s a true consensus security mechanism.
There is NOTHING other than Hive Power Stake "securing" the chain. Look at what happened with STEEM—
We got facerolled by a guy backed by the Chinese Communist Party and his Chinese-run exchange friends by effectively stealing custodial funds on their exchanges, powering them up to take over and put their own witnesses in to change consensus and power down rates—giving the exchange customers back their funds in a month instead of 13 weeks.
That glaring issue and the fact we saw our original chain taken over for a couple million dollars of investment (buyout of the Steemit Inc stake) and a few backroom deals colluding with exchanges makes us look like a joke.
Sure, the community remained, but it highlighted that any talk of security on DPoS chains is delusional.
There isn’t any security for DPoS chains—any state-level actor or millionaire at any time could buy up a large stake and take over, enriching the largest Hive Power holders while leaving the majority community to migrate to another chain.
But alas, those at the top are positioned to MASSIVELY profit from a staked asset attack, so see it as no issue. For the record, I don’t think @Ned did the wrong thing by selling his stake, as the community was toxic to him—most of us would have done the same.
Sadly, the “security” of a Delegated Proof of Stake chain is merely a lie we tell ourselves. For undeniable proof of this, look at how Sun Yuchen/Justin Sun managed to completely PWN the original STEEM chain simply by colluding with exchanges and buying out the CEO stake of STEEM.
TLDR: Our consensus mechanism isn’t secure at all. Any “consensus security” you can throw capital at to defeat isn’t actual blockchain security. This is a design flaw in my opinion, and if it was done on purpose with the plan to sell the Steemit Inc stake initially—who knows...
#12
Q: How can Hive tap into the growing DeFi trend without losing focus on its core vision?
A:
As it stands right now, the chain needs proper decentralized EVM smart contracts or even WASM (WebAssembly) contract execution (like how KOIN and EOS do it) before we can even talk DEFI / Decentralized Finance in any realistic manner.
As for the core vision of a blockchain acting as a decentralized database to store JSON and HTML to be rendered into popular frontends like Hive.Blog or Peakd.com—
It’s basically done that since day one.
Besides a few changes to the compatible databases the blockchain supports, there really hasn’t been a fundamental upgrade to the chain’s base functions as far as the users are concerned.
#13
Q: Do you think the current monetization model on Hive is sustainable? What changes, if any, would you recommend?
A:
One MASSIVE issue I have is how the HIVE Top 20 pivoted to soft fork a new version shortly after the STEEM takeover, where the Hive Power holders/voters’ curation pay was increased from 25% to 50% of the shown reward amount. This move was kind of appalling.
This was pushed through as a way for those holding the largest bags and running the chain to extract more value from the people posting on the chain and using it.
When wealthy individuals—who can, for lack of a better term, collude and combine their Hive Power holdings to keep their cabal in power—then increase the yield of their HP voting power curation payouts by 100%, something fundamentally has been lost from the way STEEM was initially marketed and sold by Dan Larimer.
At the end of the day, those who came over from Dan Larimer’s previous Graphene-based chain, BitShares, and held witness positions since the start due to this “Old Boys Club” dictate what happens on the chain—and frankly, they don’t always act in ways that enrich the community but rather themselves.
Such is human nature—humans in positions of power will exploit any means necessary to maintain that power.
Calling this out instantly makes you a pariah and dries up any HIVE blockchain funding for your dev work, because no one likes getting called out for collusion, understandably.
That being said, not all the Top 20 witnesses exhibit the parasitic nature of the long-established guys; some of them are legitimately trying to make the chain better.
By and large, however, the way the DPoS chain consensus is set up, once someone has a large enough stake, there isn’t enough stake in the entire rest of the community to dislodge these guys.
My recommendation is to remove all witness payment HP/HIVE validity in the EVM side chain, effectively knee-capping the monopoly and gatekeeping we see the largest stakeholders exhibit.
The way it’s set up now, a person wanting to have a say would need to buy a TON of stake to dislodge these guys, which would enrich them. You generally don’t feel inclined to pay people you view as sitting pretty with their thumbs up their... just to have some voting say that matters against their stake/collusion/old boys club.
The consensus mechanism was either designed like this on purpose or Dan Larimer was naive or idealistic in thinking some sort of balanced, community-based voting system would actually work when money and profit are involved.
#14
Q: How do witnesses collaborate to solve community-wide issues, and what can be done to improve this process?
A:
There are a few awesome witnesses: guys like someguy123, howo, timcliff, deathwing, good-karma, quochuy, therealwolf, arcange, emrebeyler, anyx, jesta, drakos, and a few others (<3 pharesim) who have worked their asses off maintaining and updating the HIVE blockchain codebase and building out side chains, use cases, and HIVE applications.
There are other valuable witnesses as well. The lack of mention here shouldn’t be interpreted as criticism, and I apologize to any of the developer assets I failed to mention. The ones making an honest effort to improve the HIVE blockchain as a whole know who they are... AND the ones sitting there, being massively overpaid for running what is essentially a background application on a cheap Linux server and making very little to no effort to make meaningful improvements also know who they are.
Sadly, the low-effort, high-stake-holding individuals are the ones who have the final say on who ends up in higher witness positions or who gets Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF / @hbd.fund) support—
Meaning you “shut the fuck up and tow the line,” not calling out what is effectively organized corruption and market cap extraction on the backs of folks trying to make cash blogging.
With all that potentially scathing shit being said, I’ve observed some public-facing strategies the top guys have been using to "patch the holes"market cap.
But is it to maintain their "bags" holding value, address issues with the pegged currency script, or help the HIVE blockchain itself? (@hbdstabilizer, @hbd.funder initiatives come to mind) in the
Hard to say. It isn’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Even the most guilty of self-interest-rooted actions affecting the chain have at one time or another been an asset via development or application invention—but they’ve been more than compensated in time for this, in my opinion.
The witness community itself is quite small and not exactly all in lockstep, but when shit goes bad—like chain crashes and similar bullshit—we put our differences aside and fix it as a team, regardless of being allies or wary of each other.
Albeit, there is massive incentive for anyone over witness rank #70 or so to do this as it’s impacting their profits.
#15
Q: How can Hive balance encouraging mass adoption while maintaining high-quality content and engagement?
A:
Bit of a cynic/asshole in my views on this one, but the majority of content I see on HIVE is, for lack of a better term, garbage that very few people find valuable.
The fact that we incentivize “content for the sake of content” and tend to form little auto-voting cliques—either by interacting or because they see others vote on it and try to maximize their curation Hive Power APR percentage—is all over the place.
When we were STEEM and making waves as something new and innovative, being featured on CNN and hadn't yet been shown to be about as secure as a broken window, the potential for mass adoption and active user accounts could at times be well over 100,000 or more users posting a day.. These days we're lucky to have over 1200 active accounts and lord knows how many of those are actually writing posts of value, or how many of those are GPT bots shitposting or Splinterlands players.. I could modify some chain statistics scripts I have to quantify this stuff, but I almost garentee you that the results wouldn't be particularly encouraging nor data that would help with mass adoption. A lot of the community on here, like the real OG STEEM refugees that have migrated here, are fucking awesome people.. Had some really good convos over the years and met long time friends. However remember there is a monetary incentive to be friendly in hopes of votes / payout.. knowing ones true intent is difficult on the net.
Frankly it's not out of the realm of possibility of people actively using social engineering to manipulate their followers or readers into spending one of their votes on their posts over anothers, not saying all users are like this, but sociopaths exist and we have a number of them running around on the blockchain.
#16
Q: What can Hive do to attract and support more developers to build apps and tools on the platform?
A:
Honestly, the incentive to build on HIVE as a developer, assuming you have zero understanding of the high-stake individual skewed politics and "old boys club" monopoly in the consensus bullshit, simply put, is being able to spam JSON to a blockchain every 3 seconds for what amounts to a trivial investment of Hive Power or Resource Credits.
Hive and its Graphene-based roots are a non-standard blockchain technology with its own highly proprietary blockchain operations. It is an outlier when compared to popular blockchains based on Bitcoin or Ethereum, which, as individual cryptocurrency types and intent, all share RPC and method calls.
HIVE isn’t like that. Neither EVM/Solidity contracts nor Bitcoin-Core standard RPC calls work on Graphene chains.
So, there is a barrier to entry knowledge-wise, with the reward being able to spam free operations to the chain for like... $10 USD or less worth of investment.
#17
Q: Are there any partnerships you think Hive should pursue to expand its ecosystem?
A:
The fact we're not using the > $23,000,000 USD worth of holdings in the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF) and currently use ~15.5K out of a potential $234,000 daily budget to actively develop, market, and create strategic partnerships, and don’t have people on payroll as a chain with supposed community-based consensus says a fuck ton.
A dozen or more marketers or influencers on the payroll in my opinion is a prime example of those with the voting power to enable these things either not giving a fuck and/or being lazy, or simply not understanding that we lack any real tangible technology that would make the investment of outside capital attractive.
That all being said, at the current state of the blockchain technology, the true effect of spending money on strategic partnerships and marketing would, at best, cause short-term market cap increases. Anyone who starts digging deeper into how it works behind the scenes and the fucked politics behind the Top 20 Witness stuff would likely avoid any serious partnership or investment in my objective opinion.
HIVE Blockchain is a great fit for something like a video game wishing to track and save data pertaining to their game mechanics, provided you aren’t using it as "real-time" storage but rather long-term "proof of" reference.
I, however, sadly do not believe the HIVE blockchain in its current state can be seriously considered by potential partners for DeFi/FinTech or applications dealing with large amounts of capital, given its DPOS consensus system does not provide security in regards to maintaining access to the data, but merely acts as a control and enrichment mechanism at best.
To even get dev funding and access Decentralized Hive Funds, you need over 37,000,000 Hive Power MINIMUM worth of support. If you can even find a public HIVE rich list these days, you’ll notice the disparity between the "old boys club" and normal users, which doesn’t allow for the community to outvote the dozen or so guys you have to convince to pay you.
#18
Q: How can Hive make itself appealing to businesses and enterprises looking to adopt blockchain technology?
A:
For a small business looking to dip their toes into blockchain technologies, or say use the HIVE blockchain as an external backup for some sort of non-critical data they wish to make accessible to others... Yeah, HIVE has some potential there.
As for enterprise or corporate uptake, it's never gonna fucking happen given the nature of the consensus mechanism as well as the lack of customization and control over the blockchain itself.
By the time a large enterprise had bought up enough Hive Power Stake to have control over the blockchain enough to put shareholders at ease, it would have been orders of magnitudes cheaper just to fork HIVE into their own project and code in exactly what they need.
The cost/benefit/risk business calculus simply put is not compatible with serious enterprises or corporations to consider.
For small businesses or hobbyist developers not entirely concerned about data security and that the HIVE chain effectively operates as an autocracy, it's not a bad choice due to the "free" write operations allowed by the chain with minimal investment.
Example wise:
- Using HIVE blockchain as a decentralized HTML page content storage network or as an "IPFS" like service for Text/JSON strings to then later fetch and display on your website.
- Using HIVE Blockchain to publish and store whistleblower leaks that would otherwise be purged from the internet.
It's still not a perfect or frankly optimal setup for this though.
For whistleblowers, journalists, and other sensitive information handling work, HIVE has a bit of potential sure, however, we need to be realists about it... data persistence and chain security ultimately cannot be 100% assured with DPOS, as at the end of the day, a state-level or large corporation can, has, and would get enough stake to vote in their puppet witnesses and do whatever they want to censor or edit the chain data.
Nothing is stopping governments from leaning on exchanges to use custodial funds to attack consensus, buying up stake to take over, or launching raids to seize the witness servers.
Hell, you could share something like torrent links to pirated software on HIVE if that is your business model and leverage that "illegal" data not being on your servers, but "in the cloud on HIVE" so to speak.
I love the HIVE community for the most part... But the rose-colored glasses and the delusion of HIVE being a secure and democratic/community-run chain simply put only serve to further entrench us into accepting the complete and utter lack of fucks given by those in power to put the work in, swallow their egos, and fund more development, innovation, marketing, etc., etc., etc...
Having non-active developers/Witnesses not providing any value, the best move for the community is to step the fuck down and spread your stake among the active HIVE users and let them govern...
This will NEVER happen though, because there is no immediate penalty to them being unproductive. They can all vote each other into the Top 20 and the community does not and will never earn the stake to oppose this...
Say a Top 20 witness is printing money for effectively free, with them offering zero continued value or support in regards to further development of the chain, that is almost always what will happen.
Blockchain app development, consensus methodology, security, and things like politics behind the scenes are complex as fuck to get right and almost always end up more complex than required.
I've got a few HIVE blockchain applications that have been in the development pipeline for a couple of years now, it's not for lack of want to release these, but rather the utter lack of ability for me to pay for the development and testing time required to finish and launch them.
After a long break from HIVE having had to go into other development fields and coming back to see basically nothing had been improved upon is kind of sad honestly. Came back to finish projects and see who is still around, ultimately the community is the real value for me here.
It's been a decade and like 27 versions of HIVE and we're reaaaaally not that fucking closer to even being a bog-standard minimum blockchain method compliant chain.
Guys on top aren’t going to change that, neither are people posting about it...
At the end of the day, the HIVE community is awesome, the technology and consensus of it though aren't modern nor attractive to anyone who really looks into it.
#19
Q: Some users feel the reward system benefits large stakeholders disproportionately. Do you agree? If so, how can it be balanced?
A:
Yep. Those in power colluding to pay themselves 100% more for curation out of the pockets of the people "creating the value" or creating the illusion of the technology being used and successful is fucking corruption and greed, plain and simple.
Not a personal attack against the people perpetrating this, I've certainly pointed this out for a while now, and while I used to think the guys behind it were fucking goons, after a while I realized it’s just human nature to corner markets, make monopolies, and exploit whatever you can for profit.
We do this to the planet with resource mining, we do this on blockchain DEFI making what are effectively Ponzi schemes, we do this selling morons the next best NFT, etc., etc., etc. Blockchain is just a means of persisting a ledger or database across a network so there is no single point of failure. The way it’s leveraged for people to enrich themselves is often morally bankrupt.
I am sure the VAST majority of people in their position would do the exact same goddamn thing.
Fact of the matter is:
- The entire consensus mechanism and setup of HIVE wasn’t entirely thought out, or was literally designed to enrich those in from block one and then sold as a product to someone else (which is EXACTLY what happened with STEEM) for profit to fund development of the next thing, or your yacht or whatever.
- Our society/civilizations tend to reward ruthless, selfish, sociopathic and frankly self-interested actions with capital, enforcing that making money is more important than improving the species’ experience as a whole.
For this reason, I no longer actively loathe those perpetrating this shit... I mean, it’s shitty, but it is what it is.
I would say less than 5% of people that find themselves in positions of great power do not use it to enrich themselves in some way rather than using that power to enrich others.
#20
Q: What tools or features can be added to make content creation and engagement easier for writers and creators?
A:
Hard to say... Personally, I find the setup of Peakd.com about the pinnacle of a HIVE blockchain front end, but it does leave a lot to be desired after the front end and HIVE chain itself sanitize the strings stored.
When we do get the ability to use our HIVE on other chains through a truly decentralized and secure implementation of EVM/WASM smart contract execution, it will allow for a lot more, but ultimately as it sits, it serves as a place to shitpost for a few shekels if you are lucky.
The core idea of HIVE isn't bad.
- A blockchain to blog on is neat,
- Free transactions are neat,
- The fact it’s used to contain a community's collective thoughts and ramblings is neat.
However, the idealist/naive/flawed design of the blockchain straight from the start, the complete lack of things like majority-based voting consensus, and the underlying issue that human nature in all its glory and darkness can be monetized in moral and immoral ways are problems.
It’s also important to remember that "Nothing ever gets deleted once it’s posted on the Internet," and blockchain takes that ethos and "cranks that up to 11" by cryptographically and decentrally storing your data to later be used against or for you...
It's probably not within the realm of fantasy to be able to psychoanalyze a person by their HIVE posts alone...
And while there is some amazing art, fantasy writing, stories, shares of knowledge, public service announcements, and other forms of valuable stuff on HIVE...
For the most part, I'm still kind of a cynic/asshole and side with the idea that most of the shitposts on HIVE are low or no quality.
This 100% includes my own posts; a lot of them are just me using HIVE to track my productive hours, bookmark YouTube videos or music I like, or overshare shit to strangers.
The community is the most valuable part of all of this at the end of the day for me.
Having to pivot to other software fields for calling out the shit I’ve mentioned here was me deciding to speak out instead of being a Machiavellian ass-kisser and appealing to the "old boys club" in hopes of their blessing.
@dhavey1~ It is awesome finally having you on the show @KLYE. Thanks so much for creating time for meet our Hive witness.
Do have a wonderful day 🤝🏻
@KLYE • Thanks for having me
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Honoured to be first to be interviewed by Mr.@dhavey1 in his new series!
The sentiments and answers above are my own and may not be shared by @dhavey1
As anyone who actually reads the posts may pick up, the state and background politics of HIVE aren't exactly awesome.. And while I've 100% martyr'd my witness standing pointing this stuff out, at the end of the day I'm fine with this.
Let it be known the answers in this post by myself are not meant as a personal attack against the top witnesses or the network.. but rather an objective and "non sugar coated" relay of what I've seen happen since basically the start in the STEEM days.
Will me pointing these things out change anything? Probably not, but to sit by idle and or tow the line in hopes of financial gain is arguably more damaging and Machiavellian than calling out what I can only summarize as a monopoly of power.
Be it uncomfortable truths about the technology or the somewhat skuffed politics that are generally out of the public view, at the end of the day I gain nothing and lose basically everything bringing this to light.. But I'd do it again and again, if only for some glimpse of hope that one day things change and some of these new Top20 witnesses that are honest to go trying to keep HIVE as something neat eventually have the stake to move governance from a handful to a larger, less entrenched governing body.
Thank you again to @dhavey1 for allowing me to speak freely and not editing my answers.
Thank you so much for your enthusiasm and honor! I enjoyed our interview together and your thoughts on the questions I asked you which I think the hive community will find useful. I look forward to more interesting discussions in the future!