Normally I write a post every time I acquire 1000 more account tokens on Hive. I talk about the importance of bandwidth on Hive. Sometimes I talk about Sybil attack or potential reputations systems... it takes about 6 months to acquire 1000 account tokens (5-7 accounts per day) at my current level of stake. However I didn't write a post at 8000 or 9000 because it seemed like it was getting a bit stale.
10k account tokens
I have now officially hit the mythical five-figure unit-bias mark. Hurray for me! I live in a small town and theoretically I have enough tokens to make a Hive account for every single person that resides here. Kind of crazy when I think about it. Of course providing them with the RCs to actually use the chain might be another story. Although I do think under the current conditions I'd probably be able to swing it (especially if I could get some of them to buy in on their own)
It's a little hard to imagine RCs being hard to get, but if the chain gets adoption (or even just filled up with spam) it could become quite expensive to keep transactions free, if that makes sense. Already writing posts to the chain seems to cost 3x more than it did the last time I checked. Not that anyone notices these things because more often than not having like $20 worth of Hive powered up is normally enough to whatever you want here.
But imagine if Hive went x100 and RC cost went x5. All of a sudden it costs $10000 to farm the same amount of bandwidth on the chain. That could be a pretty big problem. Many chains out there have become a victim of their own success and failed to scale quickly enough to accommodate demand.
This has been a very hard problem to pose to users who have been here for a while because almost no one is going to see price going up x100 as a bad thing. Well.. it is. It's very bad unless we can sustain that price... which we obviously can't. And then all our new users lose everything and swear off crypto forever like a drunk girl throwing up in the toilet telling everyone they're "never going to drink again". Sure you're not. See you next cycle when you buy the top yet again.
Hive has very little bandwidth available
I often repeat that our maximum blocksize is currently 22KB per second. That's actually not much better than Bitcoin believe it or not. That's about 13.5M every 10 minutes... max. I've been challenged on this idea several times with the blind retort that we can "just increase the blocksize". We cannot. We've seen what happens to the network when we max out on the current blocksize; shit starts breaking. To say we can effortlessly increase it by multiple factors without growing pains is a thoughtless fantasy.
Of course I will say that being paid to run a node on Hive does make it easier to scale up in theory. Rising cost of running infrastructure isn't going to sting if the token price goes up more. This is something that Bitcoin simply can't do as only the miners get paid and everyone else just has to figure something out.
Hive is not a social media blockchain
The vast majority of people on this chain seem to think that Hive is all about social media. I definitely don't see it that way. What I see is a blockchain that happens to have social media on it. It's a single app. Arguably it's an important one but I've always imagined it would never be our more profitable one in the end.
How much can we charge for bandwidth?
Assuming we do run out of bandwidth at some point and there are a lot of users who want to use the chain but can't afford HP... how much would they be willing to pay for RC delegations? A common retort to this thought experiment is the classic: "well the apps will have to provide the RCs for their users to maintain the illusion of free service". Hm, yes... but that only goes so far. It's quite easy to attack an RC pool with bots if those RCs are actually worth something, just like it was easy to attack HP delegations even though it was only 10 HP per account. Well actually they started at 30 HP and then 20 HP and then 10 HP specifically because of these attacks on bandwidth providers.
One account is worth 3 Hive.
A baseline value we can look at in terms of value of RCs is the cost to mint an account. For example my account has access to 455,850 billion RCs right now. All of that regenerates every 5 days. It might cost something like 3B to post a comment to the chain. Lately I've been able to claim something like 40 account tokens with max RCs, implying the cost of an account could be something like 11,396B RC... which would maybe be able to post something like 4000 comments. Doing extreme napkin math here as the exact numbers don't really matter.
So what's worth more? An account token (3 Hive), or 4000 posts worth of RCs? Definitely depends on the situation but I imagine if RCs were actually valuable enough to charge for delegations users might be willing to pay a pretty decent premium compared to the account token cost. I could imagine an account like mine going from claiming account tokens to renting out RC delegations and earning like... perhaps something like 100 Hive a day if I was lucky. And hopefully I'd be able to provide like 1000 daily active users with enough bandwidth to be doing whatever they wanted to do on chain... could be wishful thinking though considering the cost of operations can increase.
Isn't that like... rent seeking behavior?
Uh yeah but it's exactly the economic system we have. Far too many people here think if we go mainstream then everyone is going to be buying their own Hive and farming their own RCs. Why would they though? If Hive is expensive and RCs are cheap and the RCs can be converted into other assets worth more than the RCs they bought... that's a circular economy. It will work. Everyone will get what they want; supply and demand. I don't really see any way around it to be honest.
I also have a couple thousand bot accounts
On top of my 10,000 account tokens I also claimed many hundreds of accounts over the years because I view the namespace on Hive to be prime real-estate. I have also equated the public namespace on Hive with NFTs that have actual utility. Whether this becomes true or not certainly depends on our adoption levels going forward... and eventually I'll need a way to sell or rent them out if they're ever in demand.
But what I really wanted to say is that I went back and looked and some of the accounts I sniped I don't remember them being so so terrible 😜. I must have been smoking the drugs back in 2021 when I minted a lot of these. If worst comes to worst I always have a fun botnet I can play with... but also it would be interesting if outsiders could access bot accounts without having to sign up. Like they find a blog randomly on PeakD or whatever and can post a comment using the bot without having to sign in. Could be useful functionality (or a flop that gets Sybil attacked).
Conclusion
Well I think I've rambled enough. Hive has struggled deeply over this last cycle but I'm still ever the permabull. We have an interesting system here that we still don't fully know how it works under duress. Bandwidth is precious, but because it is abundant at the moment many do not realize it just how valuable it is.
Posted Using INLEO
filling up blocks -> increased RC cost to do stuff -> higher HP requirements -> value of Hive (and RCs) goes up
I'd say that's the gist of it.
Hi, @mightpossibly,
This post has been voted on by @darkcloaks because you are an active member of the Darkcloaks gaming community.
Get started with Darkcloaks today, and follow us on Inleo for the latest updates.
Do you have to claim account tokens to accumulate them?
If you don't claim them what happens to them?
Thanks
If you don't claim account tokens your RCs sit at 100% and they are lost.
You can setup keychain to auto-claim accounts when your RCs get high.
how do you do that? I just had a poke around keychain and couldnt work it out. I found 'create new account'.... is it a way to automate that process somehow?
I can already feel that is not true, because youre talking about a token, not an actual account right? Ive never looked in to account tokens
user operations >> automated tasks
My recollection is that some minimum level of stake is necessary to attain to the RC's necessary to claim an account token, and there isn't any hybrid mechanism whereby you can use your RC's and add a little Hive to cover any shortfall.
Is that the fact?
yes the minimum is usually around 5000-8000 Hive depending on the fair market value of the token which is determined automatically by the network
of course if you have less than 5000 hive you probably don't need to be creating account tokens anyway
In fact one of the big themes of this post is that I think the cost of account tokens could one day be viewed as a ripoff and most accounts get created by burning 3 Hive.
i JUST CHECKED THE BOXES ON kEYCHAIN, MY rc ARE 100%. tHANKS
Does that mean, we will break and not good to scale when rising demand arrives ? I used to claim accounts but then kind of lost interest after claiming more than 1k - after all, what exactly we can do with them ? RC can be delegated independently as well, without creating account, right ? May be RC delegation will be a business model.
No it just means that the process of scaling up is much uglier than just increasing the blocksize like a lot of these people are trying to claim. Hive nodes are not paying extra money for resources that they don't need. Everyone has to upgrade their hardware for this to happen, and that can be an expense a lot of people don't want to pay.
Thank you for the details clarification.
This is large margin!
Congratulations!
I didn't actually know how this thing works until I was stuck while guilding a newbie to create an account. I met a guy who later helped out because he had a lot of tickets and he explained how it works. This is good for easy in flow of newbies
Whatever happened to renting RCs anyhow, I'm sure that was being mooted as a thing a while back.
Going back to the beginning we said we were going to create RC POOLS.
This is where multiple users share the same pool of RCs.
If this is what you are referencing it was decided that delegations were a better solution due to simplicity and ease of implementation.
There is currently near zero demand to actually create these services because most apps have enough RCs to subsidize their own users thus far. There's also not a lot people can do on-chain to turn RCs into value other than blogging which is an extremely niche activity in the grand scheme of the economy.
If Hive had more "jobs" this issue would be much more prominent.
Oh, okay, I understand what you are saying now. You have 10,000 account creation tokens. I thought you were just talking about HIVE tokens at first and I was like wait, what?
Congrats! I've got a few sitting in my account and I have created a number of accounts myself.
Indeed. Horrible thought.
You are right, the fear of spam or bots is a big problem.
imagining 10,000 bot accounts is crazy
We saw a problem with just one bot a few days ago, what did it do with Hive Engine....
Congrats bro, on 10k tokens! Your post shows that Hive now needs more resource credits for each post. If more people join, posting might cost a lot more. Great work!
Congrats on this milestone! I'm sure this means a lot to you.
A big congratulations on the milestone, keep it up
Nice farmings those account tokens, could always be useful to onboard more people for free in the future if you need to.
Conngratulations on the 10k account tokens
API nodes, not witnesses, create that bandwidth for the network, or am I mistaken? The situation as I understand it is that full nodes aren't availed any compensation for providing that service, as (I assume) it was just assumed that witnesses would do that. As hardware exponentially improves we can hope that BT improves software commensurate to such nodes being potential to more and more ordinary folks. My hope is that every user becomes such a node in the future, truly decentralizing Hive from a bandwidth perspective.
Feel free to slap me around with any blatant misunderstandings I, an admitted non-coder, have. I'd actually be grateful were misapprehensions corrected.
Thanks!
wow, 10k! Congrats! 💪😉👊 and ye.. the bandwith is precious..
!PIZZA
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@danzocal(4/10) tipped @edicted
I'm newbie to this community andbby reading your blog makes me realized there's something more in this community. Will comtinue exploring here.
Congratulations @edicted! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)
Your next target is to reach 38000 replies.
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP