I was going to write a different post today initially but after following a discussion by @apshamilton and @enginewitty I figured I'd give some thoughts to the matter of hive's price being paired up with steem currently.
Without diving deep down into the history of the hive fork, the lawsuit that hive stakeholders won, the garbage that Justin Sun ended up buying and then quickly dumping, let's look into what's been happening since.
Now I may be forgetting some things, so feel free to remind me in the comments in case I do.
Hive has since 2020 not had a "leader" per se, no company backing it, no real team trying to get it exchange listings and promotions. Most of this has been done by a few people/teams either pro bono or through the DHF.
The team behind @blocktrades has been working on Hive for up to 6 years now and as far as I understand at no cost to the chain, i.e. no DHF asks. While I don't personally agree with that and would hope they'd ask for backpay maybe when we're doing a bit better, it is something I come to appreciate. There's been a lot of work done to make Hive as easy and cheap as possible to be ran. This means anyone can very cheaply run a witness to keep decentralization and distribution of our ledger wide.
Off the top of my head, other things they've build: HAF, sub-second irreversibility, resource credit system and delegations, wax/beekeeper/workerbee stack, etc.
All while people like @crimsonclad have been checking for other hive listings on exchanges without doing the things every other currency out there does which is pay a heft fee to get listed and/or pay matchmaking fees to generate fake volume. And for good reason, cause most coins only exist to scam others out of their other coins.
Steem has from what I understand only had some development done to condenser since (the steemit.com website).
Now here's how I view some things.
Steem is a lot more proof of stake than proof of brain, this means that investors there do better there than they do here. Now why do I say that and what makes me sure of it? Let's take a look at @trafalgar for instance. On Hive he mainly curates, is he allowed to post? of course, but he knows/understands that when posting he'd have to rely on others to wanna support him and that the community kind of frowns upon self-votes if it's overdone. On Steem however, he posts daily and is trending daily, why? Because he delegates to a service there that gives him approximately 10x selfvotes back, meaning all of his voting power goes back towards him for maximum ROI. Here's 2 screenshots from his stake on Hive and his stake on Steem, as far as I know this is all earned since the fork and he kept both unchanged (i.e. stayed staked on both and didn't power down/power up any of them)
That big discrepency shows exactly what I'm talking about. On steem investors get most of the inflation, they do not curate. Steemit itself may have some curation initiatives because other than that everyone has probably opted for max APY which in turn means most of his daily posts are probably low effort trash posts, not like the amazing posts @trafalgar used to have when he first joined the space which i very much liked and found funny.
Think about if things worked the same here, an account like @blocktrades would be posting daily and delegating to a @gotyourbackbro vote selling service, he'd be close to 40m HP today rather than his 16m he now has. So where has all the stake gone?
To authors.
Are authors rich and can wait for prices to be higher before making decisions on selling their stake? Dunno, have you looked at the economy these last few years? Most people need money and Hive has for a fact helped a lot more people out than Steem has since 2020 as is proof with stake distribution.
Why am I mentioning this? Because stakeholders on Hive are diluted stronger than there, which can affect the price.
Not only that but we also have active development through the DHF, which Steem also has one but never uses as far as I'm aware, this means even more sell pressure of Hive compared to them.
Lastly, let's get back to the market.
I've said this a few times before, but the market doesn't know all of this because we haven't been in the limelight of any crypto attention or outside news in a long time. The Hive fork itself was one of the biggest events that occurred that got attention back on us for a few weeks, big names like Vitalik tweeting about us, Justin Sun attempting to create a false narrative as to what occurred, CZ from binance apologizing for getting "tricked" into powering up their customer's stake and disabling withdrawals due to it. Other than that @splinterlands did some big moves but from what I've come to understand didn't do much for Hive itself as most players weren't even aware they were using Hive, so it was mostly just the regulars constantly posting about the game on Hive.
Other than that, we haven't had anything big happen and have kept falling down marketcaps.
3speak didn't make any noise, vsc didn't make any noise, valueplan did make some noise in certain regions but unsure if crypto people cared about it. My own projects, Holozing failed to deliver a finished product. POSH has done good bringing in traffic but very little has resulted in account registrations or adrevenue for our front-ends.
The general crypto people first care about the solution, to them DPOS was already not on a good standing due to them seeing BTS as a failed project, then Steem, then EOS. They're not aware of our tech now because most of those crowds never looked back. Others are either too focused building on the giant chains cause they have foundations, core companies like blockstream with outside investments, a lot of speculation money and active community mostly gambling on memecoins after the nft fad died away which was also abused and misused majorly.
As sad as it is, to the outside we're just another fork of the original chain. The original chain has a more unique name and does well in terms of traffic. They're not giving out inflation easily to people and are becoming more centralized than they already were.
We're the one that stood by our vision and morals and continue to do so but that comes at a cost (exchange listings, the definition of the word curation, development through the DHF on various things).
If investors who cared about longterm investments knew about the differences and were interested in something like Hive (DPOS, inflationary) I'm 100% certain they'd look at the price of Hive today and think it's a steal to get in on compared to Steem. Even our own users should think the same thing.
What's uncertain however, is, how long will outside investors stop caring about our coins, stop treating them as has-beens or "they're probably the same" and start looking deeper into what's been happening here since the fork and start understanding the value of the attention economy as it works on Hive and what it enables in a transparent and fair way.
[banner from grok]
Although I understand very little about all of this and by “very little” I mean almost nothing at all, I really enjoyed this take on the situation surrounding the value of HIVE. As far as I'm personally concerned, there isn't much of a difference. I'm still a relatively new member and a very small fish in all of this, but I can understand why it matters so much to the big players who have been here from the very beginning.
Interestingly, if I hadn't read this, I wouldn't even have remembered that I actually had a Steemit account at one point. I just happened to create it at pretty much the wrong time, in mid-2022, when the split had already happened long before.
All I know is that nothing really kept me there, while something did keep me here, and honestly, that is enough to make Hive more valuable to me, even if the situation looks different in the market. For now!
I think this was the first time I even heard about this.
Yes. It is strange that many people are powering down even at such low prices. I buy as much as I can
and I still think that it is far from enough😛I hope that I will be able to buy at least 1+k this month as well(after paying utility bills and framing a current art piece.) But I would love to see more people buying and powering HP. Even if many users would buy just 500 hp that would already be a nice sign. In recent times I can think only of a few users who I interact with who are doing good job gathering more stake or buying more HP. For instance @emmanuel50 is growing his stake and seems to be here for a long term. And @molometer is powering up A LOT of HP.Thanks for the mention. I really appreciate it. Growing with Hive has become part of my journey and I'm happy to keep growing here.❤️
Basically after we forked, people were powering down their steem to convert to hive, so steem witnesses who had taken over at the time, a mix of justin sun sockpuppets along with korean stakeholders, did a hardfork that stole something like 28 million steem from some big accounts (myself included). They thought that just because they hadn't gotten a hive airdrop (which was a new token being created and only those who voted for Sun's fake witnesses were not airdropped), that they can straight up steal people's steem with a fork. They succeeded, but another hacker took the coins as soon as they were stolen and sent them to a 3rd party account (Bittrex exchange), who then had to wait before deciding what to do with them which occurred through a lawsuit which Steemit inc lost and the rightful owners won and received the Steem back, which were worth only a fraction of their original cost, but still.
I see. thanks for explanation.
The vast majority of blockchains are not financially self-sufficient.
By this I mean that they can't continue to run without external funding (foundations, VCs etc).
Bitcoin and HIVE are self sustaining. There are a few others, but not many.
The financial incentive to run the infrastructure for the blockchain to operate comes from the blockchain itself and the price is plenty sufficient to incentivise people to run the infrastructure.
Blockchains relying on external funding will die when the external funding is pulled or runs out. Unless they find a way to create real revenue sources outside crypto.
So one way that HIVE becomes well known is simply survival.
If there is a huge die off of other crypto, then HIVE will emerge like the mammals after the Chicxulub asteroid.
The other option for prominence is that AI discovers some of the unique and really useful features of Hive (as I outlined in my post.
If neither happen then HIVE will continue to be forgotten by most but valued by the (privileged) few. That is also OK by me.
If Hive price keeps dropping, there will be no incentive for individuals to run infrastructure for the blockchain. It will die the same way if it doesn't get external funding. Running an api node is not cheap.
The Hive price would need to drop 100x for being a top 20 witness, running a witness node not to be profitable.
Witness nodes run the blockchain.
API nodes are used by front ends to access the blockchain. They are not so expensive to run but are more than a witness node.
Hive does not die without API nodes. There are other ways to directly interact with the blockchain and many AI based uses will not need API nodes.
API nodes are the ones holding the blockchain. Witness nodes don't hold the entire blockchain.
Hive.blog is owned by blocktrades, who's been running a large team of devs out of pocket for 6 years as I mentioned in the post, thus this is kind of shortsighted to think that just cause price drops that team or others wouldn't invest out of own pocket to keep API or witness servers running.
For sure there will always be those who run infrastructure for love. I believe Hive will never die. I run a witness and my cost for a long time was higher then what I made. Still today I might be only breaking even, so it's not always about the money.
But a node can only take a certain amount traffic, and blocktrades or others running this for love can only take so much. More traffic and less nodes means bad service, and users leaving, or not staying.
The amount of funds he's spent over the past 6 years on his team compared to API nodes of a shrinking userbase I think are if I were to guess a tiny fraction. Thankfully this also scales with users the same way as price.
let's hope that blocktrades lives forever...
This a very good post, I thought that I knew most of the Hive history and what is happening now, but even for me there were a few new interesting things.
I kind of get a feeling that at this point the most useful thing we could do with DHF is to get more exchange listings and create some noise about Hive even if it takes some bribing to get on Coinbase and a few more exchanges that are available to American investors.
Do you think that binance will get a european license back? and how soon?
I think sponsoring a selective outside content creators could be valuable too. By selective I mean those who'd actually like the idea of Hive and wanna work with us not just cause of the sponsorships but also use the platform and thus appreciate what it enables them, for instance being able to reward their consumers with upvotes on their content than just likes and loves on youtube.
Yes, that makes sense also... Could be thought of as marketing as well.
Also the time is running out for Hive. 10y ago people did read and write much more.
Today the young people watch videos for the most of the time and don´t have the attention span to read larger posts, let alone writing one.
Therefore snaps&waves could be more important for Hive. But there the good ones are covered among so many useless bot snaps about games, etc.
And the mobile frontends are unfortunately no competing with the big guys. It starts already with the navigation. Why on EcencyI have to hit a tiny back button instead of swiping like on X?
So it´s a combination. No marketing whatsoever (the biggest factor) plus sell pressure due to inlation plus bad/complicated product.
As much as I try to be optimistic about things I think that you are correct about attention span. I have not read a book in a long time and I think that I am not THAT old yet. So people who are younger than me and/or even more used to staring at screens likely has even worse attention span. This makes me think that future generations will likely lose all intrest in long form content.
Great.Now I do sound like a old man who thinks that future generations will be worse...Well you read this post so you're already doing better than most. I'm happy I grew up during the early internet days cause looking at how things must be now for younger people growing up with gambling tactic induced psychosis of social apps I can't imagine what it must've done to my developing mind.
It's kind of a fad however, although a longer lasting one compared to regular fads. Who knows what people will be into 5 years from now? Maybe they'll have AI's regulate and sort content for them so they can stop with the 5 sec dopemine hits but read something longer that their AI who recommended it to them knows they'll get the most out of and enjoy and maybe help them develop a healthy brain etc.
Thanks for this wonderful post. I learn a lot!
Question about current Steem: who's buying their tokens and why? Obviously based on their current status, there is no room for any imagination or story for investors whatsoever. Even if they give investors good return, still cannot explain why buy tokens in the first place.
My guess would be that Tron (Sun) is subsidizing Steem, for whatever reasons I don't know. But it's pure guess.
I don't think Sun is buying it, could be but, it's probably mostly the general market, indexes, random traders, upbit, etc.
Looking at Hive there's very little powerups from the outside, so it's clear that people who buy it very seldomly read more about it or decide that it's not worth the staking so they may only buy it for its liquid form or decide not to because of all that.
I guess the same with Steem, little buyers but probably less selling of it than Hive cause nothing is happening there except for stakeholders growing their stake.
Maybe in the short run it's oversold, but in the long run if the discovery loop remains broken, no it's not. We fundamentally can't have the feedback loop that is normal for a crypto to grow. It has become inevitable that Hive will simply keep dropping over time (or more accurately, any short term boosts we get will always fizzle out and fail to result in a positive feedback loop).
Actually, to be fair, if he were posting here on HIVE he would likely be getting downvoted because there is a group of people who frown on that. Probably not the only reason, but it's reason enough to not do it. For a while I was posting on both platforms and then pulling all my STEEM rewards and investing them in HIVE, but I had to stop because I was worried about being targeted.
Okay, but wasn't really the main point of the post. After what's happened, it's obvious why some people prefer to vote on authors who only post to Hive.
I know :) I knew you were going to say that. I was actually going to add that at the end, but I didn't.
Investors look at how their money is or will be spent. Investor are looking for profits. When they look at what DHF did, they will run away as far as possible. The damage has been done, and reputation will take a very long time to recover.
We are currently under STEEM on market cap, so we must be doing something wrong, right?
Did you not read the post as to reasons why we may be doing worse than them price wise? Quite a simplistic take.
I did read the post. My reply was responding to this:
I might be getting this wrong, but seems like you said Hive is a good investment that people (investors or our own users) can't see. My reply was to disagree, I think that investors look at how investors money is spent here and see that it's actually a bad investment.
btw you mute me, then reply to me.... true love. I love you too 😘
It seens that market simply doesn't pay enough attention to Hive anymore.
A very interesting and necessary analysis. You're right that the big discrepancy between Hive and Steem says a lot about how both chains actually work. On Steem, investors keep most of the inflation without curating, opting for max APY, which inevitably leads to low-effort posts. Meanwhile, on Hive the stake has flowed to authors, which has helped far more people since 2020, even if that also means stronger dilution for stakeholders and more sell pressure.
What resonates most with me is your conclusion: if long-term investors knew the real differences and understood the value of the attention economy as it works on Hive, they'd see the current price as a steal compared to Steem. The question is how much longer they'll keep looking the other way. I hope that moment comes soon, because the work and the conviction are there.
Thanks for taking the time to write this. It's the kind of reflection the community needs.
Why are you repeating part the post? Makes no sense.
AI probably
Very likely, it is really annoying.
Yeah literally wrote a post on it a day ago I think. You can tell it only took him 2 minutes to leave a reply to @bozz's post after mine, quite a quick reader and comment writer, huh!
This HIVE has shown that its policy is wrong, otherwise the growth in these years should not decline
Truly Speaking Their is no promotional approach of hive, not in any social media platform, 99% of people didn't even know that what is hive, Hive need to be promoted in different way , like in social media, arranging Seminar in different country and do many more that hive get some attention for investors and users!
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