Within the context of decentralized infrastructure, the concept of a niche is very important. Every blockchain that claims to be a "general purpose blockchain that can do anything" is wrong. No one piece of the puzzle can do everything, that's the entire point. Thus, finding the niche becomes immensely important to not only distinguish our favorite chain from all the other options, but also to support those chains that many would wrongfully claim are "competition". A good niche helps everyone within the ecosystem.
Bitcoin as the anchor.
Like many blockchains that are first born, Bitcoin did not have a niche. That's because it was one of a kind. It was the only thing that did what it did. We can see that this status didn't last long as devs began to fork and refork the protocols and concepts surrounding cryptocurrency.
In the beginning, we might argue that Bitcoin's niche was an alternative to the corrupt banking sector. How funny is that? Bitcoin is itself an alt. However, as time went on and more and more chains started popping up it started to become clear that Bitcoin had the monopoly on one particular asset: security. And so security via the highest hashrate in the world coupled with 10 minute blocks (something no other chain dare compete with) became Bitcoin's niche after the fact. For example: we will never see a blockchain with a 20-minute block-time gain popularity. Never, ever, ever. That market has been cornered (and nobody cares and that's a good thing).
Unfortunately maximalists refuse to accept this fact and see fit to continually cockblock the ecosystem with their fanatical view that Bitcoin can, should, and will do everything going forward. This is a fantasy rooted in greed/tribalism/delusion/hypocrisy, and they're not going to snap out of it anytime soon. Perhaps they will be forced to when Bitcoin gets flipped, but that's not going to be pretty, as most of them will simply claim that "the market is wrong" rather than admit they were wrong. Classic humans doing human things.
Ethereum as an incubator.
ETH is one of those chains that also said they were going to do everything. "General purpose blockchain" that's going to be fast, decentralized, secure, and have low fees! Yeah, that's not how it works.
Ethereum's niche didn't become clear until the 2017 bull market narrative transitioned into the ICO craze. Now it has become quite obvious to me that Ethereum's niche is incubation. Ethereum is an incubator for other projects that are too small to make it on their own and require the infrastructure of ETH to flourish or expire depending on fate. But you'll have to take my word for it because as far as I know: I'm the only one actually making this claim.
However, I believe this concept of incubation as a niche has been even more reinforced during the last bull market that was fueled by DEFI and NFTs. When we look at the key function of DEFI it's easy to see how it was so easily able to flourish on an incubation platform. That's because DEFI was a massive upgrade for said incubation. All of a sudden DEX platforms like Uniswap were providing deep liquidity pools and atomic swaps between every different asset on the EVM chains. This utility was immensely powerful; potentially too powerful for its own good considering how many scams were being fueled at that time with all the new-money floating around looking for something to attach itself to.
If you doubt me I have but one argument to make: any project on EVM that gains massive success is guaranteed to move to their own chain and break away from the chain they were originally built on. I bet my life on it. We can already see how easy this is to do considering dozens of EVM chains are popping up on their own already regardless of success (mostly to subvert high fees elsewhere and capitalize on the deflationary gas token).
There's no reason to stay parked in a network of nodes that are doing a million other things when you're the biggest player in town. The only option is to fork to a new EVM chain and make the ERC-20 token the new gas token (just like Binance did). This is the perfect solution for sustainability while maintaining backwards compatibility to all other EVM nodes. Mark my words: this will happen many times.
Monero
XMR was one of those few tokens that built the niche into the protocol on square one: privacy. This was a good niche to pick, as clearly privacy was lacking, but at the same time it was also a terrible niche to pick, because the establishment hates it. But I suppose that was kind of the point, wasn't it?
I need to reiterate that once privacy coins like Monero get their liquidity back they are going to moon hard. They've been attacked and delisted from centralized exchanges left, right, and center. They're grossly oversold because of the fear that the regulators are going to somehow win this war of attrition. Spoiler alert: they are not.
When XMR gets listed on a DEX everything is going to change. Not only does XMR get its liquidity back, but also every other token on that DEX becomes private by proxy. All someone would need to do is move their coin into XMR, transfer the XMR one time, and then trade the XMR back into the token. This will completely break the ability to monitor where value is flowing, as XMR masks the sender, receiver, amount, public addresses, and even the node of origin.
The big problem with privacy coins is that if there is a bug or exploit it might go unnoticed for years while the hacker drains value from the ecosystem. Privacy is a two-way street. Transparency is the standard and zero-knowledge-proofs are mind-boggling. Also important to note that transparent blockchains become much more private when users gain access to spending the money on non-KYC platforms. If you never identify yourself, privacy is intrinsic to all cryptocurrencies. Be on the lookout for crypto city-states with no KYC. That's the ultimate end-game.
XRP
Ripple was also a token that build the niche into the cake: hooking up with the legacy banking sector. Considering this arguably dishonorable strategy of "sleeping with the enemy" combined with their disgusting premine, it's not worth talking about much.
What is worth talking about is the Ripple lawsuit with the Securities Exchange Commission. If they can actually win (and it looks like they have a good chance) people are going to start looking at XRP in an entirely new light. Their niche very well may become sticking the finger to the regulators and acting as a legal shield for smaller project that don't have the resources to defend themselves from regulators.
BNB
Binance coin is interesting because it shows how a cryptocurrency can act as a Stock 2.0. This is what I would call BNB's niche: Stock 2.0. It's not decentralized, and it doesn't need to be. On a legal level, it's not a security, even though common sense tells us it should be. However this token has way too much utility and reasons to hold it other than within the standard investment contract (proving my point). Hell there's an entire BSC EVM chain dedicated just to this extra utility that even people on Hive are building on. Crazy stuff.
BNB coin can do a lot of things. Used to be it would just cut down on your trading fees, but now it can be used in DEFI and on the beacon chain and CZ shows no signs of slowing down. I'm not saying it's a smart thing to hold, but it does have a niche, a very good trading history, and corporations aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Stock 2.0 may yet prove its worth in the field.
Dogecoin
What possible niche could Doge have? You might be asking this question, and it's a fair question to ask. Well, for one, it's a joke. It's a meme. It's a community. Doge proves to us that community is number one and that even a joke fork of Bitcoin can have real life-changing value associated to it. That's powerful, albeit enraging at times that irrational behavior gets rewarded by the mob.
Litecoin
Litecoin is the second cryptocurrency ever created, and that plays a big factor in the niche that it's found. In a way, Litecoin's niche contains a lot of redundancy. Many people think this redundancy is worthless because redundancy is a worthless attribute within the legacy economy. In fact in the UK layoffs are literally called "redundancies".
However I still use Litecoin all the time. It has great liquidity and is really good for transferring value from one exchange to another, especially if the amounts involved are less than a couple thousand dollars (the trading fee is less than the transfer fee of Bitcoin).
Litecoin is not an afterthought fork like Bitcoin Cash or BSV. The fact that it uses a completely different hashing algo is hugely significant, as networks like Bitcoin Cash will always be vulnerable to a hash attack coming from the Bitcoin network. This threat grows exponentially as governments, corporations, and banks migrate into the SHA-256 mining game.
Litecoin is more agile than Bitcoin, and we see that they're already implementing new tech like MimbleWimble (privacy) into the core code. The differences between the two will grow over time, and the Litecoin community isn't going anywhere. Redundancy is a key aspect of robust systems. Do not underestimate it.
Tron
lol
Cardano
lol (maybe one day it will do something)
ChainLink
The niche of ChainLink is oracles.
I'm not sure exactly how it works, but there are flaws.
And I'm biased because I'd trust a Hive oracle (witness) over link.
But what of Hive?
What is Hive's niche? We tried to program in one from the genesis block just like Monero did. Our niche was blogging and/or social media. However I've done enough research and been here long enough to know that this probably is not the case. We can embed JavaScript directly into the chain. Our transactions are "free" and blazing fast with near instant settlement. We have account recovery. We have time-locked yield farming, bandwidth farming, and coin voting within a pseudo-republic.
What is a comment even?
As someone who has actually dabbled in the code, comments on Hive are kind of weird. A top-level comment is a "post" while everything else is a short thread that hangs off of the posts. When I really try to put my finger on it a comment is less of a social media thing and more a declaration:
I may have added some value to Hive and you can reward me for that value with upvotes.
This is essentially what a comment is.
And that doesn't have to be a blog post or a response to one. It could be javascript. It could be an entire program. It could be a second-layer thing. It could be anything really, but the comment itself allows for the community to reward the value procured for the ecosystem (if any) with subjective architecture that revolves around stakeholders. Is this niche even definable?
I find it difficult.
Given this context I might try to make the claim that Hive's niche is distribution. We distribute tokens in a very unique way that incentivizes value to be built. I also might try to claim that this distribution is intrinsically linked to the governance and security of the chain, so perhaps our niche is governance? Unclear.
At the end of the day a cannonball of code can come out of nowhere and make Hive's niche very obvious. For example if some game on Hive were to go viral and it was filling up all the blocks and making RCs have a non-zero value, clearly our niche would pivot definitively to gaming. I think Hive's niche is still in a liquid position and may be determined at a later date depending on what gets built here.
Conclusion
Well I once again thought this was going to be a short post and once again was able to ramble on incessantly and without mercy. Bottom line is that having a niche within the cryptosphere is crucially important, and any network that claims to do everything is provably full of it. Never trust someone trying to sell you the world. Trickledown theory actually makes sense given a non-centralized ecosystem. We must all find our niche within 'society'.
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The "Niche" for HIVE should be what made it popular when it was Steemit... a free speech platform that pays you for using it as a content creator and viewer.
This is what HIVE now offers that should be it's main niche, serving a community of de platformed political platform refugees like myself. I have lost ten youtube channels, and zero @threespeak channels. I post all my content to HIVE because it is a great place to post:
It is not possible to say what the niche "should" be.
That's just the theory.
We can't control how people use technology after it's circulating.
Just as good of a chance that Hive's niche becomes porn.
Literally all tech becomes porn if it has the opportunity to do so.
You know this already though: you're a smart cookie.
Yeah well hopefully this does not become some gross porn hot spot.
It would be great to see the content creators I watch come back to this blockchain platform. I think there is a niche there.
Actually an interesting question. How do you find a niche for something as broad as HIVE. Can freedom be a niche? haha
In 2016, Hive was designed to support high social media interaction volume. The basic value proposal was that it could perform a high amount of operation at a low cost. Over time, Hive went beyond being a blogging site and became a platform supporting all kinds of social media interaction. Luketu is for Photo sharing, Threats is for microblogging, and 3Speak is for video streaming. Therefore, at first glance, Hive can be categorized as a network that supports social media interactions.
Over time, Hive became an ideal network for the Play-to-Earn category. Splinterlands is still home to hundreds of thousands of players. The digital assets of these players have not been subjected to arbitrary interventions, thanks to the fact that Hive is a decentralized network. Based on the example of the Splinterlands, many play-to-earn games are operating on Hive. Genesis League Sports, Tower Defense, Ragnarok, and Psyberx, such ambitious new games, are expected to be activated in 2023. Can we categorize Hive as a play-to-earn network?
With the Side Chains, Hive's processing capacity will increase even more in the coming period. Splinterlands and SPK Network are Side Chains with independent validators. Thanks to these Side Chains, Hive Ecosystem will have higher transaction capacity without compromising the security and decentralized management structure. Therefore, it is also possible to classify Hive as a Scaling Solution.
Hive's Delegated Proof of Stake Consensus mechanism allows high throughput without compromising decentralization. Side Chains will increase the capacity in question further. As a result, Hive is an ideal network for applications that serve individuals. It allows large audiences to participate in web3.
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Hive niche could be global decentralized openness - it has everything the big ones have 😎
The "everything" app in my opinion is a huge mistake. Being Niche and specializing in something is where the real value is generated. Wax made it clear they were going to specialize in gaming and they are rocking at it.
I see HIVE as more of a backbone now and the layer 2 applications being built on top of it as the specialized niche focused areas. All hive should focus on now is providing the tools and blockchain infrasturucre to allow for others to build on it efficiently. The only platform I've seen come anywhere near that and acomplish it with ok success is hive-engine. These core fundamentals is what Hive devs should be working on.
Yield farming bandwidth on Hive is going to be huge.
Hive's niche might end up being security for dapp operators knowing they'll always have the bandwidth to continue operations.
Yep, I could see that being the case in either a few more years as inflation continues to get reduced or if there's a explosive demand of from a bunch of new applications that are getting a lot of traction.
If crypto is the move towards freedom of choice and more, I see Hive as the incubator to reprogram people's messed up perspective from being raised in and by Capitalism.
Honestly.
You can't offer people alternative systems without changing the thinking that got us into the pickle in the first place. The same thing will happen again, in a different way maybe, but with same the result.
Hive and the earning and curation system encourage people to uplift each other, share again and to be less "narcissistic" (which mainstream social media / Capitalism currently rewards).
If you have to use financial incentive to get people to share, engage and upvote each other then sobeit! It works. Over time... the fear of not being "Number One / only the fittest survive may abate and we can build a sense of actual community and collaboration again - i.e. we all win if we all work together and win together. There isn't anything like this out there right now.
Everyone is still trying to be a rock star. Which didn't even work out so well for the rock stars. Let's face it.
I have more... :D I wrote a whole post on how Hive works proactively, psychologically, to "heal" people and the fierce competition and anti social behaviour encouraged by Capitalism. But then I thought everyone may think I'm talking sh!t and brown nosing so I never posted it! See? I was traumatized by mainstream when I entered this blockchain. Proper.
It's a jungle out there.
There's a great deal more potential happening around here than only financial freedom. Seriously. This goes far deeper down the rabbit hole.
Well imo our niche could be gaming, we've several good projects in Hive aside from SL, although I know that most bloggers won't want to see this but I think that most Hive's volume is carried by games.
I suppose many are currently looking for the type of utility that is given to a network, and that will be the basis of the potential users that come to it.
Although the price of the coin is important, i believe that the idea behind the project and its community are things that will begin to be evaluated for long-term investments.
Well this is what i think jejej i will start following you to learn more.
For now we are sorta good at bringing different interests into the chain and linking them together. I think we become more specialized as we grow though
Excellent post.
I really dont know how to respond, but I know the hive to me, feels like home.
I would say it's a creator's home.. whatever it may mean, or even if it sounds naive..
it's true that having a Niche help in achieving your target faster
like bitcoin, we mostly take it as security after what happened to luna
Buena información, dudas resueltas 👏
I love reading others perspective on things like this. It gives me the opportunity to learn something I would not otherwise have known.
Hive's niche is decentralized text storage. It's cheap enough for that because its consensus mechanism isn't too expensive to run. Many kinds of functionalities can be built on top of a decentralized text storage. However, Hive does not run user-defined code. But that's ok because plenty of other chains can.
Awesome, i thought you gonna talk about BCH
I was only saying something similar the other day to someone about how at any point someone could create a game attached to hive or something that could capture the public imagination and it could very much affect hive’s perception outside of its current user base. As someone else mentioned in the thread there’s a broad spectrum of applications on here. I think we all agree on its huge potential and we all agree that it really hasn’t been realised yet. I stress’yet’ as i am ever hopeful
Yes, I agree, I believe that the Hive niche is still being defined.
It's probably a good thing at the moment too, as the ecosystem develops and takes shape it will also find its place.
The fact remains that there is a project behind it and this is something that in my opinion gives longevity.
Muchas gracias, con post como este es que de verdad poco a poco voy aprendiendo del tema, estoy en nivel uno. Muchas gracias nuevamente.
Is it a niche of 5000 farmers/shitposters who have nothing else to do?
damn that is dark!
But it feels like it all the time
lol bro that's brutal
I'd like to think there's a bit more to it than that.
But if we take a snapshot of the current situation without bullish speculation...
Not too difficult to come to the pessimistic conclusion.
Personally I think that people around here simply need better infrastructure to generate 'content' with higher value rankings.
Not a simple task to be sure.
I sincerely hope it is much more than that.
But look around you, how many things have failed. Leo, where you post 99% of the time is only surviving because of hive. It is just essentially 100 - 500 die hard people with time in their hand to churn and churn.
A revolution got to be a bit more than that, eh?
PS. I wanted to vote this post since I am commenting here. But I didn't and you know why. I know your heart is in the right place, but that is not the case for most.
Yeah there are some things I'd like to say in response to the LEO situation but I'm way too overexposed to chew off my own arm like that.
I dun know man maybe I don't know why you are kind of an enigma like that.
But if you say I do then I believe you.
Thanks for mentioning it though that is surprisingly helpful feedback.
I swear every day I wake up thinking that I need to just rip off the bandaid and start coding again... and everyday I don't do it. Kind of annoying actually. I annoy myself. Not a good sign. Maybe I'll pay a doctor to give me Adderall, or not. Woof.
Trending Tab apex content
Best of the best baby.
That is my point, brother.
We agree on most things
But let me fix that a little bit. I do this manually you know...........
I agreed with you Sr. Hive is about social media and blogging but I really missed NFTs because NFTs can easily integrated with social media and blockchain which I learned from deso.org
I am just an average user of blockchain and cryptocurrency but I really wish someone like you @edicted should do research on
deso.org
You can check out how they are using NFTs with decentralized social media, may be you already knows everything about deso blockchain if not please visit nftz.zone in order to understand how we can merge decentralized social media with NFTs
In my mind HIVE's niche is being a decentralized social media platform. Why blog for free elsewhere when you can get paid to do it here? There isn't much noteworthy competition at the moment.
Perhaps in the future HIVE will serve as a beacon chain for all successful blogging communities (including LeoFinance), as the total traffic exceeds capacity.
I have been working on building a Tik Tok page but I had to take a break from that because of some exams and whatnot. I just want to focus on Hive in the meantime, I might cut Hive off too. Life plays out weirdly always. Connecting with other users is very important and it is always nice to see refreshing ideas.
I see Hive blockchain dominating other blockchain in the future. Hive has 2 layer token built on it. Hive has reward, bandwidth farming and many projects. The future holds a lot of things in Hive
I strongly believe that Hive niche is the freedom that we obtain and passive income for creativity/commitment.
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With the various things that you can do with hive i guess the niche is the fact you can start with almost nothing and build yourself up a fortune so long as you are willing to put the time into this :)
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I personally don't like the fact that Hive is generally viewed as a blogging platform but it is what it is. The search for a suitable niche continues but I think we will never find one because Hive doesn't fit into that narrative.
I see Hive as the base building block on top of which you can put anything you want. Since it is great for storing data it can easily be it's own version of the internet, if enough people build enough products on top of it.
Liketu essentially built Instagram on Hive. No blogging elements to it whatsoever.
It's great for gaming, it's great for financial transactions, it's great for data storage... Why pick a niche when you are a perfect fit for every single niche out there?
Meanwhile, Bitcoin people can't figure out if they should allow images on the blockchain or not... People still don't realize how far ahead Hive is. Maybe that's why "everyone" keeps ignoring it.
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More niche ideas...
Crypto Noob Welcome WagonWeb2 -> Web3 FunnelUser Friendliness(Human readable accout names, account recovery, etc.)On-Chain Communication(Users of most other chains use Web2 to communicate.)A niche or simply a domain is driving the goal of a blockchain. Hive seems to have its anchor on blogging and web 3.0 social media, but it proved to be a heaven for starting a business with "no funds". I see it as the best ecosystem for startups.
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It's important we on here figure out what Hive's niche should be like in the cryptosphere .
By having our specific own niche, Hive I'm sure will be capable of providing a more focused and differentiated offering.
This of course will be a perfect avenue at potentially attracting investors who are seeking exposure to specific themes or investment strategies within the cryptocurrency market.
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So it could be promoted as a Layer 1 - that can be home to a number of different niches (dApps, Communities etc etc)
Regarding bitcoin, it’s currently instability is due to the greed of the whales, since they have some sort of power to manipulate the market
Hi