Many are down on Hive because of the price. For years, I felt this was a bad barometer to use as a metric for how things are going. Markets are excited, both on the upside and down. They are rarely logical while often employing the herd mentality.
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From a financial perspective, unless one likes giving his or her money away, it is best not to argue with the market. You can be right and still go broke.
Instead, a better alternative is look at what is taking place. This truly is a marathon and not a sprint. Often, we like to say this is still in the early stages. If that is the case, why are people acting like the end is near?
Development is crucial. This applies to all levels. The base layer is, of course, vital since that is the motor that makes everything go. At the second level, that is where the magic comes in. Applications are what attracts users. As we saw with CryptoKitties, it only takes one thing to get hot and things can change quickly.
A lot is written about what is being done on the later in terms of development. However, it is often overlooked what is taking place at the base layer.
The last development call was very informative. In it, @blocktrades put forth some interesting ideas.
https://peakd.com/hive/@howo/hive-developer-meeting-12
The key here is how progress is being made. Certainly, to most, it is boring stuff since it is not discussing a sexy application or a game that can make everything moon. Topics such as optimization make the majority of us go to sleep.
However, this suddenly becomes an issue when thing slow down and the blockchain starts acting up. Instantly, everyone is interested is why things are not performing well.
What was baffling is the fact that there is code that was written in 2013 and has yet to be optimized. That shows how much work there is trying to get this code up to date.
That said, it was notable that some of the ideas battered about were with the idea of looking forward a year. To me, this shows the mindset of those who are involved, realizing this is a process.
We also can take away how important the second layer is becoming. As more is moved away from the base layer, and only the most critical of logic operates there, we are going to see more rapid development.
Why is this?
Simply, because updates can be done without a hard fork. Forks are only necessary when there are changes to the base code. Anything built on the second layer can deal with servers that are connected together. Therefore, unlike the past where we had to wait what seemed like years for updates, we could have them occurring on a regular basis.
Gaining insight into the mindset of some of the developers working on the base code is very helpful. Blocktrades threw out a couple ideas that really are worth nothing.
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The first is smart contracts. This is nothing new as we see Hive-Engine working on its offering in this area. Again, the proposal was to create a second layer, smart contract server, which allowed for the benefits without muddling the base layer.
Another interesting point to this is that, in his opinion, the probably kills off SMTs. Many thought they were dead anyways since they are akin to the Loch Ness Monster, something we all heard about yet never see. The reason is smart contract enable token creation as shown by Ethereum, Tron, EOS, and Hive-Engine.
An off the cuff idea was also tossed out there about speeding up the blockchain. The lack of optimization in some areas means that we can get some more juice out of Hive. We heard that the possibility exists to drop the block time to close to a second. How would everyone feel about that?
It was stated this is something that was thought about yet is not a top priority. The blockchain is far from the point where block times are causing a problem. Compared to most of what is out there, Hive is still one of the better performing chains in that regard.
Does this call change the price of HIVE? Not in the least. However, it is helpful to understand what some of the core people are doing and how the thinking is regarding the ongoing performance of the blockchain. The goal, it seems, is to have a robust blockchain that is as optimized and streamlined as possible. From there, the tools will be built for developers to utilize for layer two applications.
It is also another reminder of how screwed up things got under the leadership of Steemit Inc and what basic development was overlooked.
In short, there are factors other than price that provide insight as to where things stand and where they are going.
If you found this article informative, please give an upvote and rehive.
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People are still having a hard time separating Hive from Steem. HF 24 broke those chains that bound us, it set us free to travel in whatever direction we wish to travel. People need to understand Hive is only 7 months old, yes we started with a lot of baggage, and that baggage is being unpacked and unbound and reorganized into a smaller neater pile.
We are far from the end, I look forward to the day when there are more people from Hive on Hive, than there are from Steem on Hive.
Very true.
It was not as if we were starting at zero but negative. We have to unwind some mess before we can start moving forward in a free manner.
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Could someone explain to me why hive keeps on releasing buggy code? Every hard fork breaks something. Why not spend more time on testing rather than development? This would certainly prove beneficial for improving users' confidence.
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Testnets are great for running new code but nothing is truly tested until it is in the real world.
After all, Microsoft has been releasing buggy code in their Windows updates for decades. It never seems to stop. Yet they are doing just fine I would say.
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Not the best example. Microsoft is notorious for releasing buggy code, indeed, but I would ask them how many potential clients they lost this way. After all the operating systems which seemed doomed to extinction are still doing well, and for good reason. The question is whether we want to produce crappy software at all, not if it's strategically beneficial to anybody in any way. If you really need good examples better look at Emacs, Linux, TeX, OS-400 or Erlang. There are plenty of solutions which are just right. In software production there is nothing that cannot be foreseen, tested and prevented. If there is that means you are using flawed technology and you should stop doing that.
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Unfortunately it goes deeper than price, even though price does seem to incentivize/decentivize participation. For this reason interaction is down making it not worth the effort for lower rep user's.
The real issue is quality and the earning curve, which seems to cause larger stakes to vote crap, which ends up in trending. So, this is two-fold.
1- those that work hard see few rewards, while easy junk posts fly by them.
2- new users or potential new users browse around and see crap. This turns anyone that cares about quality and effort away.
The large stake holders need to step up if they want to see any real value. Unfortunately, those large stake holders earn enough to make a good living, even at low values, so there's little incentive in the algorithm for them to do so...
You make a very good point. I've seen too many good content creators walk away for two reasons:
Even when large vote value owners use their auto voters to vote, I would argue they shall review their authors posts much more often. Added to that it would be great if they can include others as well, ie rotating their auto votes across a larger number of quality post producers. However, what I see at HIVE (been too short a time with Leo to know how this is at Leo), many of the high value auto voters rarely change their authors they support. The result, especially those who are getting large upvotes, some to more get lazy and start spending less time and foremost effort in their posts with the result that the overall quality of content is reduced.
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I think it comes and goes in waves, the crap it is. Never it was completely gone, and it never will. I have the 'feeling' whenever we change something big, a larger group of the community takes an extra effort again.
A key issue: The amount of interactions is low, even when we see a increase in the amount of comments made to the chain. I have less pleasure in writing and publishing when interaction stays rock bottom. Result: I write and post less. Others leave the platform when they dont see a social element, while I still believe in the concept in general and don't want to let go :)
This is an old tired argument. Could there be refinements in the economics? Certainly.
But the reality is most who "work hard" as you say, expect results instantly. There are plenty of people who work hard on YouTube yet get few rewards. The same is true in all walks of life.
Why do you think it would be any different here?
The cool thing is one can change that instantly by buying more HIVE and powering it up. Stake is what determines all. If one doesn't like what is happening, then there is a simple fix.
It is the same with the witnesses: don't like what they are doing, power up and vote them out.
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🤣 that train left a long time ago? You just made my point; you can buy your way into trending or be chosen, rather than earning through quality...
The argument may be stale for you, but it's fresh for newbies, which Hive needs. Let that roll around upstairs a bit. Newbies are very unlikely to invest until it makes cents.
To start, after four years, I think it is safe to say that users will not buy HIVE. We saw this over the years. People come on here and are looking to see what they can get, not buy into something.
Also, this is what communities are for. Once people start to concentrate upon them, the events on hive will be in the background. Those who are on leofinance each day are not really concerned about what is trending on Hive. In fact, I bet most have no idea what is there.
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I haven't looked at Hive trending for weeks. Used to be a daily occurrence.
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Lol, I guess it's subjective, but I'm not sure how you rate quality. Appreciator isn't voting quality and boosts many to the trending feed.
Stunning, well I haven't really seen smart contract championed the way the SMTs are championed but then I believe hive needs to up the ante when it comes to developments going forward. Blocktrades is full of ideas and I'm not really a technical person to ascertain if he's right or not. But irrespective we need hive to be valuable, marketable and attractive.
It not about being technical. It about defining the value propositions of HIVE which will drive technical implementations. The questions is: What shall HIVE become? Shall it stay a chain to power blogging services and other services with a social elements. Shall HIVE become a chain powering Apps like games and a host of other types of App. Shall HIVE be a token that stays a token regarding content creators and curators, or shall HIVE become a full on utility token? All these topics have very little to do with the tech itself. The tech required to excel in one or more of these ideas, will be the result after we defined what HIVE shall be and shall become.
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Well... AND is not possible with all the examples I gave :) Or is, but needs quite a few changes to become the best chain for the specific use case. Regarding the HIVE token to stay the token as it is, or become a 100% utility token moving the content rewarding and curation out to tokens on top of HIVE, is a fundamental choice to make; Both at the same time is not possible.
Nor am I but when it comes to the technical capabilities with all this, I wouldn't worry too much about Dan. I believe he was part of Bitshares, Steem, Hive, and BEOS, in terms of the development.
So he is well versed in what this is all about.
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Well that's quite versatile. I'm not in any case worried. I just hope hive manages to come out better especially if all changes begins to be implemented.
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It's time to buy HIVE. Don't wait. 😎
You never know. HIVE might be 8 cents next week.
Markets are funny animals.
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The "social" experiment that has been going on since steem 4 year sgo has "failed". Can we please give up on this first? Is it crazy to strip away something that is CLEARLY not working? To salvage existing stakeholders(monetary wise) it should remove inflation and rewards from the base layer or DRASTICALLY change it.
No one wants this as a social network, it's not going to change, why would you keep a feature on a system that will never work(it's called dead weight).
So, in summary best thing in the this juncture is to take the 2-3 BEST tech features of HIVE and focus just on that!
Your claim about 1 second block times and focus on elusively smart contract is great. It's something, better then this!
If not, someone should just fork this chain and take the tech that work and focus on that. Because the system here has become too much of the same old song and dance with no witnesses other then Blocktrades it seems, to make radical changes or expirements!
One second block times would be very sexy but I don't see it as a super priority atm, maybe we can adopt some of the recent changes @leofinance did, if they turn out to be successful (simple linear reward curve and abandoning the vote time window to support manual curation), or shortening the long power down time to something more reasonable to attract more investors.
I appreciate the "back room" work that's being done to Hive, the blockchain... optimization, updating and so forth.
But it all leads me back to the big question we have discussed before: GIVEN that we have super short block time, virtually NO "Gas" (equivalent) costs and simple sensible send/receive addresses (as opposed to 42 characters of gobbledigook) WHY is nobody looking to the simple reality that Hive ANSWERS many of the question marks raised over why BTC and ETH never became true transactional peer-to-peer systems?
It is NOT really a feasible use case to have an online store that sells "stuff" (for lack of a better term) in BTC or ETH because of the wait times and costs... at least not without having to involve a fiat-based intermediary. I could sell my "stuff" for Hive... have instant conformation, and never have to exit to fiat for any part of the process. And from a market perspective? Suddenly you have a real and tangible reason to buy and hold Hive.
I sometimes find myself wondering whether the general indifference towards such an idea is more philosophical than anything: commerce has "already been DONE" and is not "new, exciting and cutting edge."
=^..^=
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Personally I don't think there has been use cases that caught the attention of developers. That said, a strong case could be made that we are still lacking the tools to attract them. Ethereum and EOS both outpace Hive in that regard.
Hive is the epitome of a decentralized idea with many groups going in different directions. In the long run, that can give you much greater reach yet, in the near term, makes it tough since there isn't that laser focus. Many felt that marketing Hive to users was the answer, but what are you really marketing?
It all comes down to the developers. Why is EOS nowhere near the Ethereum Killer it was advertised as? Because the developers are still on the former.
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In many ways, I do think Hive is doing precisely what it's supposed to be... and the marketing issue is perhaps better left to 2nd layer communities who can have a tight niche appeal, and thus be more likely to attract the new users to their communities... which underneath are still Hive-based. Imagine 20 LeoFinance-like communities running, concurrently.
And maybe part of the answer lies there... the marketplace could even be a 2nd layer project.
=^..^=
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I certainly have and agree with you. Hive is the base layer, the power is at the second layer. That is what will give value to the first layer.
Leofinance is showing what the potential is like. A number of times today I mentioned what would things look like if there were a few dozen people who followed Real Madrid or the Los Angeles Lakers on Hive, operating in their own community. We know fans like that are passionate.
That is the true value of hive's future. Once people realize they can set up tribes like that are start to solicit people from around the Internet, then things take on a new meaning.
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i think some people tried, not that it was great.
i see it currently as an closed loop of not enough people holding hive, how easy is to get hive and are people willing to spend it now when most are waiting for the bull to do something.
number of people holding significant spendable hive is small, few 1000 maybe.
for me to get hive (it is maybe easier in other places) i need to go to the bank, send money to a local exchange, get btc (eth, ltc) than on other exchange change btc to hive, and than use it to buy something.
i am not sure how many people are willing to spend hive at 10 cents to buy something.
That is all true and do not disagree at all.
Ease of use certainly is something that is a problem as well as the distribution. HIVE is not something on the top of most people's mind (few even know about it). However, if we can keep expanding, things can change. Bitcoin was not so well known early on either.
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i was just addressing the marketplace idea. If you watched jarive's video he did with a new user and what she managed to pick up after the registration you would for sure see how ease of use has improved. i waited 3 weeks for an account and had no info about anything, except using a pretty bad search on steemit to find posts that explain something.
ease of use is for sure improving. just wanted to make a point about the marketplace idea (that i like). For people that have a lot of crypto, maybe not that hard to buy stuff with hive, but for "normies" not that easy. in my situation i need to pay 4 different transaction fees to get from fiat to hive, not going to buy with hive at the moment for sure.
i even event for a crazy rout of buying splinterlands cards with paypal to sell them for hive so i could buy hive for few $ at the time. then i caught myself not selling the cards so i abandoned that not so great idea (well i got few legendary cards, so maybe it was not a disaster)
SMTs to me sounds like it would overcomplicate the blockchain way to much, I like the idea of keeping everything streamlined and simple for the Core system and everything else can run second layer and be iterated on very quickly.
I like the idea that second layers can be updated as the code is ready to roll out, forgoing the need for a hard fork.
Leave the governance and economic changes to the blockchain while all else is on the second layer.
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1-second block time appeals to unit bias thinking, which people are prone to. If it can be implemented, why not?
From the talk, it sounds like it can be implemented, the question is how much work will it take.
As you said, it is bias thinking but, outside of that, is there much value in it. I guess as someone mentioned, perhaps it might help gaming.
More of a talking/selling point than anything else.
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It'd be a fair amount of work I would think, You could reevaluate witnesses in the process, do you have 20+1 still or do you add more or less to run the blockchain faster? You could have 60 nodes do one block each 30 do 2 each, or keep the 20 and have more randomly selected backups which would help distribute witness rewards more.
Of course you could just keep everything the same but there are options to change some stuff while you are in the area of changing block times and scheduling.
Really the code changes would likely be block times and how the system schedules blocks to witnesses and reward pool calcs perhaps, other than that..
Optimisation would be the biggest thing needed, getting everything to run as fast as possible to support 1sec blocktimes, Sync speeds would also need to be super fast, otherwise nodes may get into situations where they can never catch up.
It'll do wonders for the snappiness of Dapps and stuff having new 1 sec blocks. Gaming could very well benefit from it the most. It is a 'Nice and cool to have' feature with some tangible benefits but a lot of thought is also needed as well.
Smart contract, I hope hive developers focus on how smart contract that will be basic infrastructures of living in crypto time. Hive nodes should be locked for hardfork like dash. There are two layers of nodes miners snd masternodes. To do hardfork should have 51 % both layers. While a masternodes should have minimum 1000 dash. There are more than 4000 masternodes on dash. To do hardfork needs the huge numbers of dash that will rise of dash in incredible price and almost impossoble to hardfork. When masternodes require large number of dash, the attackers should also face the first layer of nodes the miners.
When hive network is secure no coup de etat like steemit, deploying smart contract will attract more developers.
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Improving block time from 3 seconds to close to 1 would be great for the performance of the system and apps would run faster, thus gain more. The smart tokens will bring new features and maybe pull people within the Hive ecosystem as Defi did with Ethereum.
About the price I am not worried too much as it will gain traction once the above will get done. In the same time we need to look up to extent the presence on exchanges or have a better strategy on Uniswap. Some incentives would be nice there.
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I am not sure how much the DApps are really slowed by the blocktime. After all, much of what they do is on their own servers.
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If we can squeeze out an extra performance out of the chain by all means it surly needed as it scales and the more dapps put pressure on it!
As for smart contacts wouldn’t it be a trade off on speed to get that built into the consensus? In addition smart contacts would need things like oracles and all that too especially if we want to speak to other chains and have interoperability!
I thought smart contracts would be a second layer thing that could be done in SMT so either way I honestly don’t care how it’s done as long as it’s secure, easy to use thays all thays matters
The discussion is for smart contracts at the second layer, not built into the base layer.
Nobody is trying to recreate Ethereum or EOS. My sense is the goal is to keep the base layer as concise as possible and do more at the second level.
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I really like this summary of what is under discussion for the HIVE chain. You got my focus o the topic of 1 second blocktime. While for a blogging service, the 3 seconds we have today seems to be sufficient, its not when pitching HIVE as a payment chain. I would argue, even for website payments, 1 second would be great to have instead of 3 seconds. In case we talk about PoS (Point of Sales) systems, 1 seconds becomes a must. How cool would it be to let HIVE host payment services? With its free transactions, its a great chain for this. Think of replacing the physical tokens used at festivals and events for all the people to pay for their drinks and food? Cashless events, it's called and experimented with a few years ago. The tech was not good enough back then therefore abandoned. But I love to see HIVE moving these directions; It'll give a use case that is applicable to all of us, all the people on our planet.
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That is a very good point. For blogging it probably doesnt make much difference; the same is true for most activities. However, to be a payment system, especially if some tie it to POS systems, then yes it would be helpful.
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Quesion is: What use cases we like to enable coming year and beyond? We cant do everything at the same time, thats clear to me.
I think 1 second blocks would be a good idea overall. It would allow us to claim that transactions are basically instantaneous. Not something that will really move the needle but it is a good get if doesn't require much work, will probably come in handy for things built on hive, IE games.
Yes if I understood correctly, that will require going back and optimizing the old code that was set up 6 or 7 years ago.
I don't know how much work that would take but it would be a good selling point. That said, BT didn't believe it was a priority which is probably true.
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Price aside, Hive is missing crucial features that other blockchains have had almost since the beginning. I became disenfranchised with Steemit and Hive because it's such a hard slog, the majority of content goes unnoticed and the amount of time put into it versus what you get in return doesn't make it worth it.
And just like Steem battled with, a lot of the content is low-quality trash that exists to farm Hive tokens. The large token holders rarely engage with the platform and use their wealth to spread it around. It's a flawed system because large Hive Power users have no incentive to upvote.
The unique thing about Hive is that you don't technically need to have smart contracts, as a large number of successful decentralised applications shows. However, when it comes to integrity and stability, you want to be able to ensure that the integrity of a contract can be ensured, like in the case of Ethereum.
Your current Rank (33) in the battle Arena of Holybread has granted you an Upvote of 18%
If the question is, in which insentivating the use of HIVE is very necessary, and each item of use that is given to the currency will add value.
And if I can buy things with my coins without the need to go to an exchange and then to a fiat money ramp, this would be more useful to me as a mere mortal.
Well I observe a dilemma in crypto ecosystem. The coins that are traded higher and supported a lot are the ones that have old or relatively slower blockchain system (which are mostly based on Proof of Work mechanism). On the other hand, the blockhain systems that are faster and capable of scalability are traded lower and disregarded. In the account of such a dilemma, how can we sort things out in a better way 😅😅
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That is true, historically, although I think it is changing. We are starting to see the likes of Cardano getting a lot of attention. At the same time, the lack of scaling of Ethereum is starting to cause many to question the validity of that blockchain without the necessary changes being made.
I think the fact that they have the name is what allows them to be traded as heavily as they are. Many of the faster systems simply are not well known.
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Ok, so SMTs will not be done anymore... that is why the price is so close to 0... It would have been a really easy way to create very interesting projects with very few efforts, where a lot of demand for hive would have shown up... but as it stands I do not see where such a huge bandwidth demand, like in the case of a 1000 different projects using this chain with their own tokens should come from.
Even the users who should be most interested in preserving their controversial content do not even mention it once... the dollar vigilante did not come either... this seems to be a dead project in my eyes... I have been an eager fan of this conceptfor years, but I see it now really dead, going to minimum valuations... They can take another year, I think it will not matter... there are new projects left and right, the visibility of this project is going to zero. Does somebody remember when Steem was Nr 3 in Marketcap and everybody wanted an account here? Hive is mentioned nowhere... and also now there is no budget in order to compete with other projects which are highly funded like Voice.
The only thing I can hope for is some pump in order to recover a fraction of the opportunity cost by participating here.