I've been meaning to write a post on some of my thoughts on projects both on Hive and outside that I've been witnessing grow and evolve and parts that I believe could be improved on.
I remember back in the day during the altcoin boom, when Litecoin paved the way that a simply copy with a few differences to Bitcoin could potentially be valuable as well and we saw a ton of copies and some with minor differences being created on the daily. Of course out of them some turned out to be real gems as well and while it was difficult not chasing that early mining on each random shitcoin, if you knew what you were doing, who to bet on and hodl you probably ended up doing really well. Something about those times that I was expecting to be the standard and continue on from there was the focus on pre-mines or team allocations. Now of course you may be thinking of Steem's premine and why on earth I spent all that time and effort knowing about it, well, I guess Steem was just unique enough for me to think it would be worth it. It didn't help that I had a similar idea before Steem and would've liked to create something along the lines having been an active Redditor for so long, at the same time the promise of only using the premine for the community and growth of the ecosystem got a lot of people to stay so there was that also.
Not to go down that memory lane but it's weird how quick we shifted from "oh my god, 3% premine, no way I'm touching this" to "new coin launching on binance, you can only buy up a small % of tokens, some may be airdropped if you hold bnb and rest goes with the team and seed investors". It just really rubs me the wrong way how quickly we became the same thing we thought this technology was created to prevent. Let's give millionaires and institutions and companies the chance to invest earlier than the rest of the public. Let's give the team a huge bag they can do whatever with, whether locked for some time or not, instead of say, have them invest in their own fucking product if they believed in it and the job they were doing. Of course I'm not saying not to pay developers who aren't invested, or things that have actual one time costs that are important to the projects growth and potential.
I just feel we made this technology that was meant to be as fair as possible to the people become really hard to know where you should put your money in while the leeway of abuse and lack of responsibility became bigger. There have been thousands upon thousands of projects who are just completely inactive and dead now but easily harnessed thousands of Bitcoin or ETH, especially during the ETH ICO mania and now restarted with the DeFi stake to invest mania. Which if you play it right is safer than the ICO craze and reminds me a lot about the things we could've been able to do with our blockchain, i.e. invest in projects with delegations. Some even did and got some success out of it, not many, maybe a handful, but our ecosystem is and remained too small to attract bigger projects and people.
I've been an investor in Gods Unchained for a while now. A Hearthstone & Magic the Gathering copy built around blockchain tech, it sounded great in the beginning, and although I'm not counting my investment in ETH dead yet it's something that makes me think of how things could've gone better. Mainly the part where there's a real company behind the project and the interests that align with that in mind. You would've thought I would've learned during the Steemit times that if there is a company behind a cryptocurrency the interests are never going to be towards the community and users but mainly towards the stakeholders, in my defense Gods Unchained came out before all the shit went down with Steemit to really open my eyes. But open my eyes it did, because ever since then I've been looking at the activity of GU a lot more closely and wondering with each decision if they did it that way for the growth of the project and the value and potential wealth going to the players and the community that invested and made it possible or if it's been for the seed investors and stakeholders. GU isn't the best example, and quite frankly I haven't had much time to look into other projects that are run by companies because I have way too much things to do on Hive and have had the past few years to even look closer into other projects aside from the few I've invested a bit of coin into.
Img SourceMy point being, and this is something I've seen happening on Hive as well, is that there's a lot of projects and people behind them who are thinking short term instead of long term. With this, again, I don't mean try and recoup the costs as early as possible of what you may have fronted to get the project going and then start profiting after that's done. But I feel there's many who attempt to maximize said profits, while minimizing the money invested up front, often just copying some other ideas from other chains, not open-sourcing the project ever, not decentralizing it, only looking to make as much as possible and not caring about the people who may have invested into it. I get it, investing is risky and not everyone should expect returns let alone to profit off of it, I'm not particularly talking about making sure investors are happy so much so that it means you as the creator/person in charge of the project were to run at a loss or never make a profit. What bothers me is if the amount of maximizing profit is so big that not only does it take it from the investors but at the same time stifles the growth of the project and at the same time adoption of it and Hive since that's where it exists and that's where it works well due to the ecosystem we have here that doesn't exist anywhere else.
I'm trying to be as vague as I can as I don't want to mention which projects I have in mind myself when I wrote this out nor do I mean to point at them and single them out. My point is more about what we can do better in the future as the past is the past and what's done is done.
I've personally been planning a bigger project for quite a while now but I definitely don't want it to run and evolve like some others I've seen in the space. At the same time I think there are some aspects we forget of what can be done on Hive which not many other blockchains can offer so while I'm hoping no one beats me to my idea I would gladly welcome more projects starting off this way as they'd have a high chance of success here and to grow past just the hive userbase and potentially grow it as a side-effect.
An idea, a community behind it from the beginning, open-source code, transparent payments and funding from the DHF.
This is what I'd like to see more of on Hive and I'm going to tell you why and how I think about it and why it would be better compared to the general standard we're seeing in the space today lead my centralized initial exchange offerings and the likes.
Imagine you have an idea for a project, preferably something that can only work on Hive due to proof of brain but not necessarily because of it as it won't need it to survive. The proof of brain aspect is a solid bonus as it lets you create the community in the same space, reward people for participating in said community and at the same time have the community already here waiting for your arrival. The community is already plugged and ready to go.
Now you're in need of developers to realize your dream, they may exist on Hive already or outside. In this day and age more and more people know about crypto or at least can receive payments in it, whether they create their own Hive account or want it sent to their exchange accounts it doesn't matter, what matters is that the project is transparent about everything because this builds trust in the community along with the DHF.
The DHF and open source. These two go hand in hand because if you're going to ask for funding from the DHF you're going to want to have the project be open source in case something happens along the way. This is the trust factor. There are some exceptions of projects who've already proved themselves as example peakd.com but for any new project they're most likely going to have a hard time to convince stakeholders to receive funding without being open source from the beginning. Especially if the DHF is what's funding most of the development work (which wasn't the case for peakd). This is to mitigate the risk of dev teams either leaving things in half and not finishing their ideas or moving away if something happens with all of the code as we've seen happen with projects like dlive.
Open soureness also gives people a lot more options, they can pick apart your idea and create their own ideas if they so choose. I'm personally not someone who values IP a lot, if I'm going to create a project and my idea isn't as good as it can be and another project pops up that uses the code and improves on the idea and the community chooses to use it more than mine I don't think I have the right to fight that. That's free markets for you so you better get used to it. I understand some projects that start off closed sourced and open source it later but if most of the funding is coming from the DHF I don't think you can expect that to happen unless you're a really trusting person and are vested in the ecosystem from the beginning, that's on the stakeholders to decide.
So what I'm trying to say with all this, is that this way the community will not only have a lot of say in the original idea, improve on it and feel invested, but they'll also get the most out of the project if you're doing things with the long term profit in mind instead of short term. There's way too few people and ideas existing that truly believe in Hive so much so that they're willing to push aside the profits or have them scale with their idea becoming big in mind but choose to chase the profits early and then lose motivation or care about what happens with it. I think it's quite psychological and most likely depends from person to person and a range of other things such as market movements, userbase growth, etc. Could also be that my ideals are a bit naive where I expect to make a worthy profit off of my idea first when there's 10x+ more users using my project and/or if it has brought in that many people to Hive because of it. Where the community, early investors if there exist any and Hive itself (due to the DHF's funding) is profiting more from the project than I am early on before the idea becomes profitable because so much activity is occurring around it. I'm not going to get much into making the project work cross-chains as I think interoperability is a requirement in this day and age and should be an obvious step but for the sake of giving back to Hive there would still be the need for people coming in from other places to use a Hive account to operate on your project. This post already got pretty long so I'm going to skip discussing why that is important.
There is no other chain like Hive, there's so many ways projects big or small can be funded and value being created for everyone involved. All things from the DHF to post reward pool to donations in form of tips, investments, beneficiaries and delegations. One thing I wish I'd see more is transparency, the lack of need to get the most out of it early because you're the one behind the project and building with the longevity in mind that not only when the project itself becomes big you start to get a nice return but also when Hive as a whole gets bigger which will help your investment both in your own projects and your Hive holdings together. I think that's something we should strive for and I'm sure many stakeholders would agree that it's something important that they would like to support as well.
Last but not least I wanted to give a small shoutout to my POSH project. It's the first token I've ever created even though I've been here all this time and have seen the amount of tokens being created with some turning out as well as leofinance while others not so much. Many of them have not gained my interest due to the fact that the distribution seemed off and it seemed like something that would mainly give the creators a profit more than the community and this is why when I created POSH I wanted it to be as transparent and fair as possible. Meaning no tokens were given to people who didn't earn them the way it was meant to be earned. I could've probably paid developers myself as the costs of it are quite on the low side still, which are being funded through post rewards on @poshtoken right now, but I wanted this to be a community thing where in the future maybe the DHF would support the growth and further development of it and it being equally fair to everyone sharing their content and bringing value to Hive through attention on other platforms. So far so good, let's see how POSH continues to grow in activity and value being generated for Hive.
I'm hoping to be able to start the idea of a bigger project I've been planning for a long time very soon and that it'll be as valuable to Hive as some of my other ones have been so far, if not more .
30% of post rewards going to @poshtoken to help fund it.
Thinking long term does not help, unless there is a definitive plan on what are going to be delivered - every long term must consist of clear break up of shorter milestones and commitment around that. Talking long term without definitive plan is useless.
Well, Open source definitely helps in the trust factor, but getting the DHF may not be directly related to that. There could be a good open source project, but still not got DHF. I have heard that its because of interest of large stake holders, and only those get funded, who have some kind of association with them ?
Not sure where you "heard" that, but it's utter BS. I'm one of the largest stakeholders, and I don't have an association with any of the currently funded projects. The only DHF project that BlockTrades (or me personally) received any funding for was the image server proposal (50K HBD). There was also a 3K proposal by @therealwolf to create FontAwesome icons for Hive, but I only acted as a payment agent for that, I didn't keep funds associated with it.
Why blocktrades don't work?
And open-source is usually one of my key criteria for voting. Even among currently voted in proposals, you'll find that my vote isn't typically on the closed source ones. @acidyo brings up one of the most important reasons for that: the effort on a closed source project is often totally lost if the developers abandon the project and no one else can continue it.
I definitely agree with that.
I'm also highly in favour of open-sourcing, but I'd say it's a balancing act between how much value the project provides to Hive and how certain it is that it won't just be abandoned (i.e. is it just code or is there a real company behind it?).
Imagine Splinterlands would have asked for funding, them open-sourcing their files could have made it difficult to prevent copy-cats from popping up. Code is still intellectual property and I personally wouldn't release it unless the position of my company/project is established & secure.
Nice :) I'm with you off-chain work need to get rewarded. The best would be a neutral way, that rewards the most value to bring onchain.
I think Posh is a nice start for it.
IMO with Blocktrades sidechain that's coming at some point, things will speed up much faster than we all expect. In case we should be able to create onchain softwallet on sidechain, onboarding would become super easy.
Special for minigames, payment dappss or social media dapps that want to onboard the masses. Hive wallets could be the " verified" Twitter version and normal wallets are the common version.
Hive is something that I think a lot of investors underestimate, what the future impact can be :) patient is key.
Well, lots to unpack here, and I appreciate you taking the time to write out your thoughts like this. Overall I love the passion for (and focus on) transparent, win-win projects, backed by the community and leveraging Hive's strengths that I'm reading here.
To me every project is basically a 'business', whether people openly admit it or not. (I understand some people get upset at such a label, but it's the most appropriate I can think of.) Even a charity is just a business that doesn't operate at a profit. And because projects are run by people, each project is either invested with enough heart, passion, belief, resources, and backing by humanity to thrive, or a project is unable to sustain such investment and dies. I wrote about this more in my 'Business Is Simple' guide, so I won't get into it here, suffice to say that the most thriving businesses are the ones that encourage people to do as you've outlined:
And I'd love to see more of this around, whatever form it takes. Thanks for the great read and food for thought man, and huge props to all the projects you've already launched. Psyched for whatever you have planned, and wishing you a great day. 🙏
I don't like the word business cause it entails quite a few things I think we can live without in this technology. One of them and I'm a prime example of not following it is people thinking I'm supposed to act all professional and nice to people who turn out to be assholes or have ulterior motives when approaching me about something. I'm someone who prefers actions over words and behavior. We have the power here to do real things, with transparency on our side even charities could operate on a whole charitable way compared to the centralized ones which 99% are most likely scams and owners pocket some money here and there along the way. If you want you can call it business but I'd much prefer doing business with people who treat certain things as hobbies and are okay with it, there's many examples of great projects being created where people just had an idea, did the work together with other likeminded people and it became some great things without needing to treat it as a business or forcing people to show up and complete their part of the tasks. That's also something that with opensource can be done where some drop out and others come and take their place to continue working on where they left off.
Another aspect of for instance POSH is that if something were to happen to me the project wouldn't die off but others could continue it as it brings value to Hive.
I totally agree. And as those projects thrive due to humans investing their heart, effort, and contributions into them, personally...I still think of them as a business. POSH would continue as long as some people kept investing their energy/efforts into it, or it would die if no single human wanted to invest in it.
To me, 'business' is a huge blessing for the world, and has been since cavemen discovered bartering. But I get why people don't like the word and associate many negative things with it.
Ultimately, I don't get too picky about language. Regardless of what you or anyone calls it (biz/project/hobby/endeavor/collaboration), successful 'projects' are the backbone of the economy, have been since the dawn of civilization, and I celebrate and encourage yours. :) 🙏
Good read,
Been Linux user myself over a decade now,
open source culture rules 😎
@acidyo, you obviously have a deep understanding of Hive and it's ecosystem ,so i wonder if you would consider writing a comment in the BeInCrpto Telegram channel to Terranova to shill Hive? Details in this post. https://ecency.com/hive-167922/@atma.love/opportunity-to-shill-hive-in-beincrypto-premium-telegram-community
Then either you or Dan could do livestream with Terranova. Or, I could just share this post of yours and tag him, with a few words of my own, but would you be prepared to answer follow up questions from him?
Thanks for considering this.
Namaste
Atma
I'm unfortunately not using Telegram and can't get access to it right now. Maybe @theycallmedan would be able to-
Thanks for reply. Dan said he would do interview if someone else will write the comment. Perhaps there's another way to connect? Would you suggest someone else if not please?
Twitter could be an option. I see Terranova is active there too https://twitter.com/TerranovaPicks
This is why I love you acid. Speaking the words on my own mind so eloquently.
I insist that no user says things as clear as acid, is very aware of what is happening in the market and the community, reblog
Yeah, Acid rocks!
(Though even if I'm less aware of the market/community, I mean... I'm pretty clear in general, just sayin'.) :P 🙏
glad you are on board, we need people like you here! Looking forward to your new project :)
Thanks sir @acidyo for the informative post and That's why I love hive there's no one like hive.
Indeed short steps higher vision always makes difference in a long term.💖
Yeah, the dappler dapp thing was a bummer to see. Maybe its was all eye candy and was halfway done on hopes they would be funded or someone would pick it up. I didn't look too far into it as i am not a dev nor have money to buy it😄 but it certainly was disappointing to see a potentially successful dapp get thrown to the way side without much noise for it or support.
The dlive part threw me off. There was issues with the code?
Hopefully, as the HBD and its interest rate is tested over time, we will see more conservative investors willing to make more common sense investments into the Hive ecosystems in terms of moving assets here, better investing into projects and making smarter long term development projects work as a result.
What are your thoughts about adding stipulations to the apr % and making it fixed for at least 30-60 days so as to take away any notions of colluding from potential investors.
But I digress. I agree with you about some of the token projects and haven't been too excited to explore any really simply because if they are running off hive and all the content is still running on Hive, then why not just invest directly into Hive. Admittedly, I'm invested into HBI(Steembasicincome) but that is a program with long term plans for hive has proven successful, still not a token but figured I should disclose.
I would like to invest into hashkings but development seems snagged with mobile. SL reminds me of a vegas casino but cant hate the engagement and excitement it brings to Hive.
I think what your doing with posh needs to be further supported and pushed harder.
In my opinion Hive could benefit from as many potential new investors, developers and users in order to achieve the growth of hive.io that us(not you acidyo your a big staker😄) small stakers would enjoy as well as sustainable quality development. Which is why I love Posh. Hopefully it achieves just that.
I should read further into posh token and look to invest just to support despite not having a twitter.
Thanks for your thoughts!
Hi there, just wanted to reach out about an issue with @reward.app, and I don't know if anyone looks at replies on that account.
It has come to my attention that your service eats at least some H-E tokens, like SPT. My friend @shauner had an 18k SPT post get eaten by you guys, and I've lost at least half a dozen posts worth (on this account and @kennysgaminglife)
Now he's digging in and it looks like y'all are just selling other people's rewards on the market...
This needs to be remedied somehow - at the very least it needs to be made very clear to not use @reward.app for anything that would otherwise receive tribe tokens, unless you're going to just fix the issue.
I'll be putting out a post warning people not to use @reward.app anymore, unless they're only receiving Hive/HBD for their post.