Thank you for sharing your ideas around. This is what I wanted to hear. The idea with memecoins sound good. The hype for memes have died down for now. They might come back up. We might be able to repurpose some of the existing HIVE-Engine Tokens if necessary. The technology is already there to wrap them onto EVM Chains. $LEO is the best example of this.
Adding a some gameplay with HIVE branding (bees, hexagons etc.) and promoting other DAPPs inside the game can be good marketing strategy. There are many games with good art on HIVE.
@leofinance is already working on an ads protocol. Their previous attempts did not last long for some reason. I did earn some $LEO form the views I generated for the ads. There is another idea I have been thinking about:
You bring up a lot of good points in the Hackathon post you did. I was one of the technical mentors for the EOS Hackathons back in 2018. They were very exciting but like you said. Guys would do a rough concept and then got a somewhat large chunk of money for it but most of it wasn't further developed.
The LeoFinance guys are the real deal and I like how they have tried so many things and thought through so many theoretical concepts of how to drive demand to a token. It has been an interesting case study.
With the gaming and funding stuff it's tough. I have just seen it over time with EOS / Block One and also with STEEM / Hive a lot of people haven't gotten any love even when they put in a ton of work.
Ultimately the EOS situation was another great example. They raised 4 Billion in the ICO then still have 160,000 Bitcoins and let the community break there backs and did minimal amount of funding and just chilled with that fat stack of coins. It got so bad Brendan Bloomer set Twitter to where you couldn't respond on any of his stuff if he wasn't following you because everyone was saying he was a scammer.
With HIVE / Steem it was always tough to get funding. I put up a gaming proposal when the system first came out and got rejected. When Partiko didn't get funded after having that working app a lot of people were using it made me hesitant to go deep in it.
All that being said I have always talked about STEEM / Hive over the last 8 years and they have been interesting tests in a way. Look how unused the STEEM DAO is and the pricing and market cap has remained somewhat similar to HIVE's which is odd in some respects. Then over the years there have been so many attempts for other crypto social media to get rolling but none of them ended up comparing to these in a lot of ways. Maybe the initial funding and inertia was so great that it had that level of success.
One thing that has always blown my mind is that in the last 8 years freedom of speech has been in serious jeopardy but you don't get a ton of the type of content we see on the other platforms like on X.
With the incentive structure the way it is people gravitated more to producing what I call content mills where they just post nature stuff or pets over and over because they found that was more effective than saying anything that might rock the boat.
Once in awhile I will post some red pill dating type posts. It's not popular here which is odd when you think of the demographic of people on this chain.
I saw a report that said there are only around 4K active users on chain at this point which is crazy to think about in a world where so much stuff is getting censored on traditional centralized social media. People are more willing to spend all day on that stuff not making any money but in the same respect very few have been able to parlay any sort of STEEM / Hive fame or status into something else.
I had no idea you were involved with EOS Hackathons. I have complaining about the exact things you mentioned. There have been many hard working developers who never got funding. @kencode and @risingstar are two examples I can think on top of my head. The idea of funding project with DAO delegations came after trying to think of a way to get the Whales to fund more development.
@dalz has a lot of stats on blockchain activity posted. These are the active users for @peakd
I have noticed that people tend to be around where other people are. If we need to make HIVE blow up, we will have to onboard users with very little friends and social media activity (such as myself) or onboard an entire community at once. The other alternative is games.
I've been going on podcasts lately talking about Peerhub, would be nice if the Hive community had some marketing connections too so that more video creators, livestreamers and podcasters could discover Peerhub and what it can do for their discoverability. It would really help us out yeah if even some basic funds could be thrown our way to help get it to the mainstream.
I'm crushed myself due to the bear market. If I were in a better financial condition, I could donate some crypto. With multiple failed attempts at entrepreneurship, I can say that getting to the users is the hardest part. The only way to onboard more people is to use paid ads and that is not sustainable. I really wish some influences with large followings will come across Peerhube and make it more popular.
Yeah I never had much luck with ads. I myself have trained my eyes to ignore ads, and ublock origin browser extension handles the rest.
Onboarding a couple of major influencers would help a ton. Vigilante.tv gets millions of views, but he is not considered an influencer. We need an influencer with at least a million followers to spin up their own Peerhub-powered site and actually promote it.
Usually this will take a large content creator facing censorship on centralized social media. It will be an uphill battle. If we could at least get some crypto influencers to cover Peerhub and other decentralized social media applications, it will be a massive win.
Yeah, I have been in crypto for 11 Years and STEEM / HIVE for 8 years. Had the first Bitcoin ATM in Arizona, was a technical mentor for the EOS Hackathons in Sydney, San Francisco, Africa (Remote) , have done various other things in crypto and have a computer information systems degree from a respected university but I have never been able to get a job for a blockchain related company or get funding from any proposal I have submitted on various chains. Everything has been self funded for me.
I'm not trying to cry about it because like you mentioned there have been a lot of people who cranked out projects and had working products and still didn't get funding. Once I saw a lot of that it made more and more sense why so many people leave projects and launch their own thing. It is like churches in the Midwest. They just pop up new churches all the time to control their own funding model of people donating to it.
I'm not trying to act too bitter or anything about it. Others have done more than me and got nothing.
Overtime there are a few things I have realized. A lot of these blockchains are more like testnet scenarios with a bunch of people testing on it but a lot of people not agreeing and there isn't as much central direction which has advantages and disadvantages to centralized organizations.
I always do calculations on these various blockchains to see how much it would cost to take a position large enough to have considerable control and then do the risk assessment if that makes sense or if it would just make more sense to launch my own project and how much that would cost and what are the risks of that. Considering the SEC likes to sue everyone it becomes a major factor in the back of my mind.
Once the momentum and liquidity dries up there isn't enough funding to self propel these chains and people are onto the next new thing. We are into that situation with DTube.
I guess the biggest worry is what if things clinch up so much with HIVE that it ends up in the liquidity situation that has happened to Golos, WEKU, Bearshares, Serey, Blurt, WhaleShares..... Sounds bad but as the prices sag everything clinches up even more. Those in control hunker down even more for better or for worse. Then people feel like it is too much of a risk.
This was very surprising to hear. A resume like yours is extremely good. I only touched cryptosphere in 2017.
BLURT is doing somewhat okay and there are many authors from South Asia. Steemit is somehow doing good with web traffic. HIVE should be able to manage fine because of all the development we are seeing around. My fear is that some new Web 3 social media project with VC money and fancy marketing will take most of the marketshare.
I feel second hand frustration about many of the things you have gone through. The only way out for HIVE to get back in Top 100 is to onboard as many DAPP developers as possible and take marketing seriously.
I compare some of the stuff to other projects that are fighting through a similar type thing from a different angle. Telos and WAX are two projects I look at that have a lot of positive things going on but have slipped way down in the rankings.
STEEM Has a Tremendous War Chest that isn't hardly being used. $4,664,052 X $2.41 (SBD) = $11,240,365. Not using it and not developing much and STEEM is in a similar position. Kind of strange yet interesting.
I ended up putting up a marketing proposal.
https://peakd.com/hive/@brianphobos/how-to-save-hive-meet-jimmy-sandfield-our-new-pitchman
With the memecoins there has been such a flood of them but I'm surprised that no one did the hour glass structure that Safemoon was from last cycle. I know those guys ran into issues with a lot of the stuff they said and the Department of Justice was going after them for fraud but besides that if that same structure was used for a meme on Solana I just think people would love it. Getting rained on in the wallet was something people really liked because that whole thing was a built in affiliate program and incentivised people to HODL without the coins being staked for a certain amount of time. Someone could have sold at anytime.
But yeah the premise of harvesting funds from other chains as a partial revenue model.
Solana had some infrastructure to easily create memecoins. The challenge will be to Bridge the Tokens to HIVE. Involving anything that is tradable on LeoDEX is a good place to start. There is no Solana support yet.
Well I'm not even saying having the meme really exist on the HIVE Blockchain as a tokenized version over here. I was more thinking of a secret strategic mining project on other ecosystems and crank out memes on various chains keeping 5-8% and then essentially using those funds to trade back into SOL or BNB and then use that war chest to advertise HIVE, pay developers to build games on HIVE, and help pay for hosting and pay for partnerships to get HIVE and HBD on more exchanges and that type of thing.
Imagine 100s of memes across Fantom, Base, TRON, SOL, Avalanche.....etc. It would be a small team and it wouldn't be announced what memes were part of the project on the various chains. As entertainment for those on those other chains funds would be collected for the HIVE War Chest. The same could be done with NFT projects on the various chains.
Another idea would be to utilize AI to crank out HOW TO content that takes YouTube videos and embeds them and then summarizes the steps of HOW TO Do something and then tries to optimize for SEO and collect Adsense and other ad revenue to add to the war chest.
(More Controversial Idea) Have a small team of SIMP Farmers who make AI generated women and harvest money from platforms like OnlyFans that then gets added into the war chest to build products on HIVE.
The way all this works is initially funding something like 4 separate proposals through the HIVE Fund with covert code names like "Operation MEME Storm", "Operation Lonely Road" and then not going into heavy detail but for it to be talk about in discord and trusted users on HIVE would be recruited to lead the covert operations utilizing the funds and paying other trusted users to build out a team and crank up the operations.
Another more direct route would be to pay a very experienced video game development company to build a Metaverse that is a play 2 earn fantasy world that connects to HIVE and utilizes our usernames and sells land and resources and advertisements within the Metaverse.
All we would really need are some really well built games that required buy ins to do more things in the game creating a ton of demand for HIVE. HIVE is one of the only ecosystems that could actually support an actual Metaverse.
I like the idea. A war chest is definitely needed. Convincing DHF to spend on anything will be a very difficult task. The initial steps will have to be bootstrapped. If more people were thinking like you (especially among the Whales) we would have a lot bigger brand recognition and user count.
I agree the initial steps will have to be bootstrapped but at what point does someone want to take that bet or take that bet on a newer blockchain. As time goes on the ecosystem has grown and adapted but also has a lot more competition as well.
A lot of people don't want to admit this but guys like Jerry Banfield pushed an enormous amount of traffic to STEEM. It's tough to assemble that level of marketing push.