It never gets easier!
The four year cycle has not been as kind as we would have liked. It's been an honor clawing through the trenches with the other degens on this network, but the days of just trying to survive the crypto winter are coming to a close. All hail the majesty of 2025.
The numbers and variables are different for everyone, but I start to notice these things real quick when I begin to plug the numbers and do the maths. My 100% upvote as of today is $6. Meaning I can create $60 worth of inflation a day... quite a bit for just clicking a button 10 times, eh? Half of that is the curation kickback that goes directly into my Hive power. That's a $900 a month yield per month. Double that to around $1800 a month if I'm writing blog posts.
Seeing as I live under the poverty line in America (by choice at this point) this is more than enough to pay all my bills and still have some money leftover for whatever. It's always a big milestone when this happens and I realize "wow this is like a real job". Proven by the fact that I haven't earned a paycheck anywhere else since before September 2021 when I moved to PA.
And then comes the pipe-dream thinking and counting of chickens before they hatch. What happens if Hive were to go x10 from here? Then I'd be making like six figures yearly and have a massive 7 figure powered up stack. Would it be could it be let it be. Please please please.
Although I'm not so naïve this time around as I was in 2021. I may have been here since late 2017 but I've only actually experienced one true bull market from start to finish. If I'm being honest it was a bit lackluster and I expected more. I think we all did. Maybe 2025 makes up for it. Maybe not.
Most of us have experienced huge disappointments when it comes to crypto. There is never any shortage in this regard. In fact when emotional state rises to this level of "wow I finally made it" or "wow I finally made it all back" the market usually pops in to remind you just how fragile these liquidity pools really are.
Creating liquidity with USDT
Hive craves liquidity and the recent perpetuals listings have been providing a lot "out of thin air". Derivatives require collateral to exist, and the vast majority of perps collateral is USDT. We can buy and sell Hive on these markets using only USDT, which is extremely useful to our network in particular because so many of our governance tokens are locked inside the governance contracts.
For example today is not a particularly crazy day but just the 24 hour liquidity on Binance perps for Hive is showing $429M worth of daily volume. That's almost double our entire market cap. The bots and liquidity providers and legitimate users are sloshing quite a bit of money around within the casino, and that's good for us.
wow... nice
If we tried to buy a million Hive on the perps market it would barely move the price... not even one penny higher. And the only thing required to buy that amount would be some amount of USDT leverage. Could be x1 or could be x100, whatever the trader decides is reasonable.
Compare that to the spot market and price would spike 20% or more. Of course these perps contracts are not "real" and only offer the user price exposure to the underlying asset, but still that has a lot of value in itself. It also seems like the massive liquidity of the perps forces the spot liquidity to be higher than it was just a few months ago as well. That's good for everybody.
Hive continues to grind forward
We've got a lot of interesting projects rolling out this year. A lot of it is just "boring infrastructure" but infra is a required toolkit for creating all the cool stuff. I keep telling myself I start grinding out my own project soon™ but we'll see how that goes.
Another huge milestone that is going largely unnoticed is that our debt ratio has already gone full circle in very short order. Things were looking a little dicey there when it was 10%+ but now we are back under 5% even after providing 15%-20% yield on HBD for an entire 4-year cycle. Take a minute to realize how big of a deal that is, especially in the face of all the naysayers who said this was impossible to sustain. The math was on our side the entire time and it was obvious (to me at least). High yield on HBD will continue to benefit the network by providing more value than the cost to run it... that is until the math is no longer on our side, in which case I'd make a plea to lower it.
Some will look at numbers like this and think maybe it's time to boost the yield back up to 20% or even higher. And that is exactly what we don't want to do. Yield is a lagging indicator by definition. APR itself is YEARLY, as in the number doesn't materialize until a year from now. As number goes up we should be considering lowering the yield even further during the good times so that we have runway to jack it up during the bear when everyone needs a win. Buy low sell high. But I digress...
Moving forward
Hive obviously has a lot more work to achieve. We desperately need more ways for our users to build value and get paid for their work (IE content creation or any other job we can muster). Easier said than done obviously but I think we'll get there sooner or later.
Conclusion
Number going up is a weight lifted from everyone's shoulders.
Don't squander the opportunity.
I did not know you lived in PA I work out of PA a ton. It's actually pretty easy to get a good meal for low cost in a lot of that area. It also resonates that Hive could be a full time job depending on you stack size. I would love to see hove 10x. I don't think it would be enough for me to retire but It would be a great start.
Yeah I moved to the Poconos
East Stroudsburg
after living in CA and OR my whole life it's pretty weird I can cross borders into another state in 30 minutes.
Both NY and NJ are right there.
I grew up just outside of P.A. Near Binghamton. Our family often vacationed in the Poconos.
Actually flying in to visit family next week briefly. Getting ready to say Brrrr.
Curious your prediction of Hive high water mark for this bull run?
2$ would be amazing. though that is just a wish and based on zilch. But i often dont understand how hive can have so many people earning and cashing out from reward pool and yet still go up. 🧐
Hive's yearly inflation is less than 8%.
So if the demand to buy Hive in a year is higher than 8% number will go up.
Even Bitcoin still has an inflation rate of something like 1%.
I don't have one.
Hive is too volatile and unpredictable to even guess.
We're off to a good start though $2 would not be difficult.
Last cycle Hive went x30 from the bottom.
If we pulled a similar move this time from 16 cents that would be $5.
But selling the top is not important it's better to stay balanced and not wipe out.
Will write more about this when it's relevant.
lol, sorry to get specific, but you seem like you know things 🙃
8% of what number?
haha. maybe i should know this on my own. feel free to ignore me.
8% of the number being inflated.
Total Hive in existence.
sooooooooo
8% of 464M Hive
but it doesn't matter what the number is
8% inflation is 8% inflation is 8% inflation no matter what the number happens to be.
You can think of it as the price going up 8% less a year.
Can Hive go up more than 8% in a year?
It's not very much when you actually look at it.
I feel nudged a bit closer to understanding.
Appreciate you taking the time.
This is great, but it's funny as everyone holding HBD just lost out on Massive gains!
Only accurate if we assume that they traded Hive for HBD at the bottom.
A lot of these guys have been holding for years and are up huge.
Ever thought of moving to another country where the cost of living isn't so high? You could live like a king with the same amount of money.
No I've never actually considered it but I've seen others do it and know that the dollar can be worth 10x in other locations. At the end of the day it's not really an option to me and I'm somewhat tethered to this country for various reasons like most others.
Hah, this has been the chant for the last 7 years, eh? Let it come true this year—finally!
If anything push the APR of HBD down to 10%. The biggest issue with hive is the emissions over half are tied up as staking rewards let a lone it takes 13 weeks to power it all done. It's a pretty wild system when you think about it in terms of locking up periods etc. I get why we do it but I feel like that's another thing that holds people away from hive. It's good to see us over $0.50 at least and holding there for a few days but it's still rocky with some wild swings as of late.
I could see moving to 12% at like $1 and lower and lower as we go up to flush out the debt.
At the same time I want to see 25% to 30% at the bottom of the next bear.
Surely this is a pipe dream unless I vastly increase my influence here.
I'm slowly turning HIVE into HBD during this upswing for interest income.
same!
I love how Hive continues to go upwards these days. Heck, you are right, Hive needs more work and a lot to achieve. I guess it's really a long term investment.
If I remember correctly it was something like $10 at the peak in 2021... Personally, I believe we will easily see HIVE at $5in this bull market as my gut feeling tells me the current phase is more similar to the 2017 bull than the 2021 one. The altcoin season is around the corner and I can't wait to take some damn profits. I was such a loser back in 2021 but I also learned a lot by losing. Oh, and in regards to HBD, I can't wait for the bear market to add some to my savings. And short every damn meme coin back to zero of course...
shorting memes is going to make the bear market super fun ngl
I've been trying to take advantage of the spikes myself. Pretty interesting seeing the pattern, every couple days at midnight utc it spikes. There is a nice trend line building.
That make sense in the lowering the APR as the Hive price rises. I think it could be a thing coded to the core rather than an option for the witnesses to choose so as Hive hits varying price metrics the APR would automatically change. We have many years now of data to work off of.
Good point I've been thinking about an algorithm to guide this metric for a while but it would be difficult to come up with a good solution that everyone would be on board with.
It would just have to be based off the historical data really. We know what the range has been and then extrapolate that out to extremes to cover moons or crashes. If it was varied by algorithm instead of whimsy it would create a bit more stability from an outside perspective and for those of us who use the savings.
yeah it would have to be based on very long averages... potentially even four years long to account for an entire cycle. we'd need to figure out standard deviations and adjust based on the volatility. Unfortunately I only took stats 101 in college and that's it :D
But this feels like a potential. The APR is low hanging fruit compared to the other issues the chain faces and it there is no reason to leave it in the witness's hands when we have the data available. Maybe @arcange has the skills to pull the data from the chain? But then there is convincing people it should be coded in.... Hmmm...
pretty tough sell to go to the witnesses and say "hey let's take your power away you're bad at this" lol
would make a lot more sense to create the algorithm first and see if we can get witnesses to adopt it one by one before actually hardforking it into layer zero
might even be better to leave it off the base layer as a suggestion to the witnesses so that if there's a problem it can be fixed manually
It would have to go thru the sand box for sure. Thankfully there has been better use of testing as time has gone on. I'd just REALLY love to see this be a standardized formula so we have a constant. And I have zero coding ability so this all comes down to convincing others to do the work... DAMN IT JIM!
I'd be happier if the number was going up because we have more people coming to the platform, but I guess beggars can't be choosers right?
you want HBD rates to go up to garner attention?
in my experience nobody is interested in stablecoins and nominal yields during the hype cycle
everyone looking for a 10x or better
hive pumping and the services we provide to users has always been the main attraction
we could use some more games imo
I'd be cool with them back at 20% ATOM seems to be able to sustain it. You are right though, people want those insane gains, everything else is just blah for them or they find a way to disparage it. I would like some new games that are immersive and not just clones of other stuff that is out there.
It sure is interesting seeing the Hive numbers go up so nicely, and yup, that tipping point…
Great to hear that you could actually live off of Hive, in the US! Pretty amazing in fact! And if it would 10x… well, we can dream? Right? And is it? Steem was even higher once than 10x Hive now…
Very interesting read! Thanks for sharing!
!HOPE
!BBH
!INDEED
!BEER
!PIZZA
Nice I cannot wait for the end of the month too, to check the results.
yeah it will hit a point where sellers get exhausted, and new users coming in to buy up a bag large enough to power up and participate will outpace the sellers who are cashing our their rewards
10x would be nice, I would take it. 😀
But 2x or 3x would also be good for me.
I take some gains and put them in HBD savings.
If it goes down, I can buy again at lower prices.
Your analysis is very thoughtful and grounded! The experiences you've shared about the ups and downs of the crypto market are relevant and educational for many. Your mix of optimism and realism is truly commendable. Having such a cautious yet hopeful perspective on the future of Hive and other crypto projects is important, and here's hoping that 2025 brings great things for all of us!
It is nice to see Hive going stronger
I am surprised with polygon and HIVE, both have good utility case but price is under 1 dollar.
Sure beats my collecting pop and beer cans for their 10 cent cash deposits in my years before Hive.
$PIZZA slices delivered:
(1/15) @borniet tipped @edicted