Today, in a few hours, my @pibara account, my oldest account on the HIVE blockchain will be exactly thee years. It have been a quite vibrant three years, and while the interaction with many of you have been amazing, I've also bumped heads with some of you on occasion. The chain and its community for me have given me moments of joy and amazement and other moments of sheer frustration, and even anger, as well.
Looking back
My first two posts
One day after my account was created I did a first post, then a then, not long after, a second post. Both posts ended up being pretty important to what happened next with me on the chain.
My first post was what later turned out to become a chapter of my HIVE(STEEM)-FIRST e-book Ragnarok Conspiracy. My second post was a post on p-values. Fiction, mathmatics and data-science have remained prime themes over the years.
First steps towards development
Not long after joining the chain, I got interested in doing some software development to make some cool stuff that worked on the chain. At first I as unaware that there was an API available, so I did some scraping. This is my first post where I used python an some web scraping to run a little lottery. This idea later grew into my first bot on the chain, the now retired @croupierbot.
Prime sponsors
Different themes different beneficiaries. While the platform is great even when just making $0.03 on a post, up votes by beneficiaries, supporters, and specialized curation groups can help a whole lot in funding time and expenses on projects that would otherwise be quite difficult to do.
While I've had many up votes over the years, especially when starting out, the support by @curie, @blocktrades and @steemstem has been of great help. Later when I started doing more development and tutorials, @utopian-io was there to help me explore that extra direction.
Crowd-sourcing editing & funding for illustrations & a translation
Now we come to the main reason why HIVE (previously STEEM) is of so much value to me. Before finding the platform, a few years before, I had made a start at self publishing. I had self published a number of short stories and had just about made end meets on editing and cover art costs from the sales I managed to make. I had been a member of an indie author community on goodreads, until the moment two mods of this group started interacting with me in a way that was rather stressful.
Now for me dealing with stress has more severe consequences, than for most people. I have a hard time coping with stress, and I have long term health issues that make my limited capacity to deal with conflict a potential life threatening problem. So if things happen that lead to major stress and conflict, I just bail out of self preservation. In this case this meant I wethdrew from the community and stopped writing.
Shortly before I joined the STEEM community however, I had been doing some scribbling. Some flash fiction using the world building of an abandoned short story. After joining STEEM (now HIVE), these pieces of flash fiction started to materialize into a longer version of the short story. On the blockchain, the short story came to blossom into a full size novel.
The size of the novel however was prohibitive. Editors don't come cheap, and after years away I couldn't exactly expect my old fans to have stuck around for new work, I couldn't expect the editing cost to pay itself back. So instead, knowing how my benefactors had helped me make some funds posting my rough chapters, I used much of the funds I had made from these chapters, and used it to make finding errors, the type an editor would catch, a way to win prizes. @croupierbot helped me crowd fund my editing on the blockchain in a fun and playful way.
But after this I still had funds left. I ran an other competition. This time one for artists. The winner of this competition was the talented @marylucy from Venezuela, who I ended up contracting for making a series of illustrations for my novel. And she was willing to work for STEEM, so everything still was contributing to the blockchain its internal economy.
@marylucy introduced me to a friend, Gabriel who did a full Spanish translation of my novel. While I paid Gabriel in LTC, in the end, net, I can say the whole cost of editing, illustrating and translating my first novel into another language had me into negative numbers no more than a restaurant visit with my wife and kids to my favorite restaurant would set me back.
In the end I think it is fair to say the community and my fiction benefactors have allowed me to realize my first novel, and I will be forever greatful for this.
@Pibarabot & the flag war visualizations
As my journey into development for the blockchain continued, a second bot came into being. @pibarabot. This bot did periodic weekly posts reporting on the flag wars that were going on at that time. Here is an example of the kind of visualizations my @pibarabot used to create.
Asyncsteem and txjsonrpcqueue
Doing development in Python using the official Python library, it soon became clear that the official library had some code quality and general design issues that were pretty much impossible to build stable and reliable software around. So after a while of getting more and more frustrated with the official library, I wrote my own JSON-RPC client library for STEEM called asyncsteem. This at the time was a Python 2.x library, that later got ported by @scottyeager to the Python3 library asyncsteem3. I later started at a huge refactor of asyncsteem, txjsonrpcque, that came to a first alpha release and worked on both python2 and python3 and was aiming to not only work with the twisted asynchronous Python framework, but with Python3 native asyncio as well. The later eventually never happened.
Non-standard rate limiting on API nodes
I had been running @pibarabot for quite some time when disaster struck. Steemit Inc had decided they needed to rate-limit their API nodes, and in doing so thay had pretty much killed @pibarabot. And not just @pibabot at that. One of the big selling points of asyncsteem and txjsonrcqueue had been its superiour asynchonous streaming speed compared to both the official python library, and the then already much better alternative BEEM. I could have made eithe library conform to rate limiting had Steemit Inc implemented rate limiting according to industry conventions or draft standards, but Steemit Inc hadn't done any of that, so not only was @pibarabot dead, the whole architecture behind my two asynchonous Python libraries for the blockchainwas dead as well, at least for those use cases where these libraries would be the better choiche over the then available synchonous API client libraries. I needed to do a full redesign.
STEEMSENSE
So with much of my dev effords blown out of the watter by the rate limit, I focused on the only dev project that didn't suffer from the rate limit issue. STEEMSENSE. This project aimed to provide a community advertising platform loosely modeled on Google's AddSense and the Amazon add system. The idea was that providing an advertising platform for top content creators might convince top content creators to move to the platform, and could allow people like myself, wanting to advertise while also supporting the internal ecconomy a place to spent our advertising budget on-platform.
The new curve, move to CreativeCoin, SilentBob and retreat from development
But then the next bit of disaster happened. The EIP. At the time the EIP and the new curve happened, I had spread my stake over five different themed accounts. Most of these accounts instantly became useless for the purpose of social interaction. With fiction being my main source of STEEM income at this time, this was the dead blow for my dev account @mattockfs. I consolidated most of my stake into my @pibara account and moved about a quarter my stake to #creativecoin for social interaction purposes. I wrote a little curation frontend using txjsonrpcqueue and the keychain lib, and my Silent Bob curation initiative was born.
Silent Bob broke
Then the straw that (almost broke the camel's back. I still don't know what exactly made things brake, but after my Silent Bob curation initiative web frontend had been working amazingly well for a while, it suddenly stopped working. At that point I had grown so tired of things braking, I just gave up and retreated from curating as I had from developing. I planned on coming back, but I took a long pause.
The HIVE fork & Creativecoin moving to Hive-Engine
Now we arrive at time close to now. The whole TRON thing happened with 孙宇晨 doing a hostile takeover and he and his gang doing a decentralization attack blockchain heist. In one way I found this a bit amusing as in my novel I described a blockchain heist of a somewhat other nature. But then the good news came, a fork. At first I was cynical of the fork and thought its ideas of forking out ninja mined stake were misguided and a missed opportunity at truly forking out ninja mined stake. But when #CreativeCoin announced it would be moving to the new chain as well, I was convinced HIVE would be the place to be. I also revived @mattockfs with a few hundered HIVE. Redfish level, yes, but at least the account was alive again.
Now
Giving myself a HIVE birthday present; A Dolphin now
So now to the present. My third birthday on the chain. To celebrate my blockchain birthday and to truly commit myself to the new chain, I bought some extra HIVE to push both of my accounts to the next level. @pibara became a dolphin a few days ago, and @mattockfs was restored to Minnow status.
Looking forward
Hivequeue, return to the dev track
So from here looking forward. I've decided to make a clean start for my dev work. My STEEM de work is tainted by the whole blockchain heist and I'm deleting the github repos next month. So I recently started a new asynchonous JSON-RPC client library for HIVE. For now this is my only active project as a dev. I'm starting with adressing what broke the old libs and projects, rate limiting, and I'm building from there. Hopefully a first beta will be ready by the end of summer.
Nutridiluvian, my revived fiction project.
As for my fiction. I am currently working again on my Nutridiluvian fiction project. A collection of short speculative fiction stories inspired by Nutrition Twitter. My source of inspiration is currently low as everyone on this globe seems more interested in Covid19 now than in Nutrition, but I'll keep working on it somehow.
Silent Bob Curation
I've restarted curating fiction on CreativeCoin. I'm using my old STEEM stake to buy more CCC tokens for curation. I'm trying to do so without attempting to get the most CCC for my STEEM. The hive-engine markets aren't exactly healthy markets yet, and buying available CCC curently cors 3 times as much as you get when selling it. I'm sure this will soon correct itself though, and any CCC bought at 0.009 will soon feel like having been the bargon that I already feel it is.
For now though my curation is without the cool SilentBob comments. Once HiveQueue is up and running, getting a new and improved frontend for it for my personal curation efforts will be the first thing on my list. For now though, making sure the undervalued creativity of fiction and poetry on #creativecoin has at least a fighting chance at a spot on the trending page.
FAIRDROP ? HIVESENSE ?
Finaly two projects I'm not sure about yet, and if I start these, it will be some time before I do. Will I restart STEEMSENSE in a new HIVE based variant when HiveQueue is ready? Maybe I will, not sure yet.
The second one, a just for fun hive-engine token and airdtop just to make a point? I've communicated some ideas on how both ninja mined stake, self-vote circle-vote and pay-bot-vote stake could all be either have been forked out or attenuated to a much fairer level. I've done some mini simulations in the past discussing the EIP curve, and I'm confident I could do a full-history simulation leading to a merely interesting airdrop. The idea would be to create a just for fun hive-engine token to do a what-if fair airdrop with. At the risk of someone else claiming the token just to spite me, I relly love the name FAIRDROP for a token like that. As with some kind of HIVESENSE, I'm not sure yet if this project will ever get started.
Keep Hive buzzing
That's it for this blockchain brithday post. I'm fully back. Sorry I've abandoned you guys for a bit after some dev misfortunes. And despite there not being any @utopian-io left to make development worth my while, I still feel I owe it to the dev comunity to make hivequeu the best asynchonous HIVE JSON-RPC library that I can.
I really hope a future hardfork will repair some of the damage the EIP did to social interaction, but then HIVE already seems to have a bit more of that than STEEM did after the EIP came to be. This time around though, I'm not going to be concerning myself with any of the political nonsense. Writing and curating fiction, curating poetry, doing some development and occasionaly writing some data science and data engineering blog posts.
Congrats and thanks for all you have given to the STEEM/HIVE community.
Congratulations on the three years and the dolphin status. i remember those early days, early days for me also, I had a lot of fun trying to help, and glad to see you back and a bit more active once again.
Happy anniversary! We are happy to have you at STEMsocial! :)
Gefeliciteerd.