It's been a hell of a ride and we're just getting started here on Hive and I've been thinking a lot about what the future looks like here. As of now, it's official. Hive is the new Steem. We'll probably lose a few apps in the transition, but we've passed the "this might end up being another Whaleshares" phase.
While some were slower than others, all the key dapps are coming over. That's great. Now we have to turn to the problems we've always had. The good news is that without an overlord over us mismanaging everything, we actually have opportunity to do things different, maybe even better! :D I see some people saying Hive is an oligarchy. I don't really get this. Some people have more stake than others. Those people have more influence. Decentralization is not a boolean. It's a spectrum, and this is the most decentralized we've ever been as a community. It's up to individuals to decentralize further by buying or earning Hive. It's no surprise that the people that are the most invested, get even more invested when opportunities knock. That's not something to be frowned upon IMO.
Anyway, what this post is about is what I think is our best bet at making this system sustainable and better yet something that can thrive. Some of the ideas I've seen mostly revolve around further incentivising and rewarding staking and in one form or another, punishing or devaluing selling.
I think we've already pushed this concept pretty far while not focusing at all on the real variable that will add value to the system which is monetization or new money coming in and staying in.
Here is the big picture of what I'm envisioning.
- The community funds the development or buys software and adds it to our "suite" of open source tools that we offer to developers and users.
- Monetization is built into these features that in one way or another adds direct tangible value to the overall system. Ex. burning tokens or funding the dao.
- It would be up to the community to patronize or not patronize applications that "if using "our" software, made sure to send value back to the community.
Examples
- Jimmy's Digital Marketplace App
Jimmy creates a proposal to develop or have developed an open source decentralized digital marketplace app that can be integrated on frontends at the account level so that each Hive account can have a "store" where they can sell digital goods. Since Communities are just accounts, they can have stores as well. 10% of each sale goes to the dao. Jimmy's proposal is funded and we pay him to continue developing the app through the dao.
Apps that use this application are expected to leave the community cut unchanged if they want to get support from the community. It would then be up to the community to support or not support applications that could potentially fork the code to cut them out. Which I doubt people would do.
Also since Jimmy is continuing to develop and improve the app, if someone does a fork, they now have to maintain their fork themselves. I think it would be the path of least resistance to just use the app as is and be in harmony with the community.
- Yuki's Fundraising App
Yuki creates a fundraising application that can be integrated into frontends allowing any user at any time to create a funding campaign for anything and track, and receive funding from the community. The app is really well designed, user friendly, and widely adopted.
As a community, we make Yuki an offer to sell us her application which we open source and add to our "suite" of tools offered to help bootstrap developers into our system. We pay Yuki to continue to develop the application through the dao and now all successfully funded campaigns pay a percentage of their funding to either the dao or burns tokens by sending them to @null, whichever one adds the most value, maybe both.
Using this structure we can create a virtuous circle of development and value addition and creation. By keeping this value open source we only ever add value. Someone can fork any one of our applications and close source their fork. If they dramatically improve it, we can make them an offer. This could create competition to create the next best version of each app and any new developer that looks at Hive will have a ton of tools to start with for building their applications.
This would also shield us from situations like Steemworld.org right now where an emotional beef leads to us losing an application that many users value and want.
As a side note, I think we should also leverage traditional crowdfunding services like Kickstarter/GoFundMe/Patreon in this as well. It's my opinion that too much here revolves around stake. The vast majority of users here have little to no impact on the HPS or whatever we're calling it, but also the vast majority of users here could afford to fund a crowdfunding campaign for something they felt like would add value to their investment here. I'm not too proud to use these services that work if they will ultimately make us stronger. I'll use anything at my disposal.
This is our current situation and it's unsustainable. Even if we increase staking incentives we still haven't created any new value, we've only doubled down on bad economics IMO that says "we value you not ever selling your tokens".
What value is there in a harvest that can't be reaped?
Are we just waiting until more people buy in after us so that we can dump on them? That's not an economy, that's a pyramid scheme, a very elaborate one, but still, it's just a pyramid scheme.
Where I'd like us to go is having multiple inroads for new money to come in based on actual real world value being created, then having those new funds be able to be circulated in the community as much as possible.(People using their Hive to buy things with Hive) and with these two things working together, ultimately building a future where they outpace the selling and inflation, and because we have a token with real value and a real use case we won't have to bribe people to keep powering up and please don't sell. We have to get out of that mentality IMO.
What we currently do in the best case scenario is give developers a fertile ground to grow their apps with a pre-existing userbase, but in most cases the blockchain does not directly support these developers. Maybe users do via upvotes to their reports or something like that, but in this situation, if someone creates something that's wildly successful, THEY DID US A FAVOR, and we did very little for them, therefore they don't owe us anything. If anything, we owe them. In this case if they decide to go to another blockchain, we're screwed and we can't really be mad. They provided us with a cool app/service and we used it. End of value exchange. So while they might do really well individually, the system doesn't necessarily. I think we can dramatically improve this, by not only "bringing successful apps into the fold", but also providing them with more and more tools to get started. That way the value exchange is a bit more balanced and more developers and users will want to build and invest here.
Basically I think we need to become something like how Autodesk works. Autodesk makes Autocad, Maya, 3DSMax, and others. They basically have a monopoly on 3D software, not totally, but just about. If someone creates a plugin that's great, they buy them out and add that feature to the software. They also bought out all their competition. We're a long way from buying out competition but what a paradigm shift that would be.
What do you all think? Let me know in the comments.
There is only one path to sustainability. Remove all HIVE Rewards and move them to 2nd layer (SMT or Hive Engine Tribes). Hive Payouts only for witnesses for securing the chain.
Seems I forgot an "ir" somewhere in my comment.
Hive needs new marketplaces to attract costumers as well as active users. As Gen1 users, we are there and we will be. However, we still doubt whether we can reach to the desired / the deserved value of Hive.
Thank you for this awesome post @midlet
Great diagram really makes your point sinple to understand.
We need HBD 2 years ago. This may solve dapp retention issues.
I think Hive can be salvaged or I wouldn't be here.
Hopefully we stay in top 200 while this downward pressure continues. We may drop out of the top 100 this week.
Hive is still struggling, not as bad as whaleshares, but I don't think we are out of the clear yet.
I'm not as worried about price. We won't have a realistic idea about the price of Hive until after the 13 week powerdown period. For people that leave STEEM and for people that will dump Hive. I imagine a lot of people are sitting on the sidelines to see what happens or if there will be a huge price tank and big time buying opportunity. I'm one of those people haha. I bought some at .10 cent, but I'm still waiting to see if we're going to go much lower. I imagine others are doing the same.
The main thing that concerned me was app adoption. If we have the apps and the community, we’ll be fine I think.
I'm also doing the same. I have a stop that will allow me 1:1, just in case. It will be more important in about a month or two, especially if we get good news on the roadmap.
I think below top 200 could be devastating for our moral and rep. Few chains come back from there and if the price goes below 500 sat, distribution could get messy. Not every new whale will appreciate honest curation and the need for distribution. A situation where the reward pool is just seen as inflationary income again will be disasterous, especially if dao is voted to be burned. Good proposals need to happen, a road map will help with this.
So in ~13 weeks let's pay close attention to distribution and hope we end up with an even more equitable distribution of power.
I like your proposal of funding and buying some apps to make them opensource, not likely right now, I don't think that HIVE has enough funds now, but is an interesting point. From the diagram you made, you consider appropiate to introduce ads?, and you think that would be advertisers interested?. In Steemit the ads didn't work apparently very well.
Another thing, IMO we could also think in some kind of funding to contract developers if needed. I have seen that PeakD is asking people to work with them, I see in that very positive news.
The amount of money currently in the Hive dao is 9.6 Million dollars. We could also fund the purchases through traditional crowdfunding. If we say we have 5k people here that care about things enough to spend some money, spread that across the different income levels and I think we could potentially fund or buy quite a bit.
There's a lot of ways to do ads and ads are the only reason Steemit didn't completely go under. To create a robust ad platform is pretty complex and that's not what Steemit had. I think they were working on that, but they had "cheap" not very targeted ads.
If we instead gave ad space to each community and let community owners manage their own ad space and sell it, then required all sales pay a fee back to the system, we could potentially have something more effective as well as being more decentralized. Just one idea.
Yes, with the dao we can hire developers. I'd suggest the devs here get first dibs, but if someone wanted to project manage the hiring and managing of a project, I think that would be something worth trying.
Very interesting, that is a important budget. Then ads is a good path to improve this place... not a big fan of them :P but I want this project to grow and wouldn't mind to me to have some, if is good for that.
Apps will be great but light accounts would be greater what happened to all the work openseed was going to do for that?
Also with SMTS the old dev team said it was almost done surly that could be implemented ti HIVE
Well light accounts would effectively be an app. They wouldn’t exist on the blockchain. OpenSeed is only working on chat for Hive. I mentioned previously that it was a potential use case for OpenSeed as well because they would require an off chain database and that’s basically what OpenSeed is.
Pretty sure all I’ve heard is SMTs are still on the roadmap and happening although I don’t personally think they will make a huge difference in our situation here.
Where's Yuki and Jimmy and how far along are they on their projects?
Where is the Hive DAO?
I think HIVE does not have the original "Ninja Stake", which means that the only things that are funding development are income from upvotes, and income from running witnesses. -- Where is the DAO, and how do we integrate DAO contributions into community participation or as a flat overall systemic tax?
Then, how do those funds get distributed in the DAO via a voting mechanism from the participants?
All of the Steemit ninja mined stake went into the Hive Dao so it's a ton more funded than the one on STEEM. The Hive Dao is funded via Hive inflation so it's always receiving funds.
Proposals get funded via staked based voting. This is already set up and working. I've already indirectly been paid by the STEEM Dao via the OpenSeed project I'm working on.
https://peakd.com/me/proposals
All the pieces for what I’m talking about already exist. It would just need to be executed.
"Executed" - What stands between [NOW] and [Every Account has a Shop] // [Every Account has a crowdfunding option?]
You are Openseed?
What is the function of that project?
My examples are not real active projects. These are just things I think would be good ideas. When I said what I was suggesting was in place and working I meant the proposal system and means of funding projects.
I am not OpenSeed. I've done some work for them. I've written some posts about it in the past.
https://peakd.com/hive-136578/@midlet/openseed-and-openlink-for-dummies
https://peakd.com/hive-156509/@midlet/openseed-openlink-work-and-thoughts-on-radical-transparency
https://peakd.com/hive-136578/@midlet/hive-openseed-the-next-big-step-forward
This is gold!
Thanks!
Absolutely love what u said there. Odd that no one has shown some @tipu yet
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 12/18)
agreed.. was planning on quoting it too, but you got there first! 😃
Lets make HIVE more valuable by adding more and more apps.
Yeah, this is a good proposal. Having an app store will let us to be visible with many people. Not only that, it can help us to earn more money where we can supply for new development. It's not a bad idea though, many of us will know how to encourage people join us as well.
Member when splinterlands did an open seed to early buy for promo packs and real world merchandise, I would love to see that on hive as it would drive demand for hive.
I agree, I think the best way to attract content creators is to give them the tools to thrive. Ie They need to be able to make money. Our culture of “Power up, and never sell!”, and if you sell you’re bad for they system will keep content creators away.
No discovery tools will keep them away. Communities are a good start but we have a long way to go.
Poor UX will keep them away because they’re focused on content not learning this crazy complicated system.
I think we incentivize good content by improving and innovating on our apps.