As you all know, I am not a developer. It is a skill I have a lot of respect for and knew right away it was not something in my deck of cards to play. Which is fine, I rather not end up like Jack. I want to master my craft.
All of the Hive I have, I am in profit. I believe my avg buyin for my STEEM was around 50 cents, give or take, I almost bought the top in 2017 & I laddered down the entire 2018/19 bear from a high of 4.20, then 1$, then 80 cents down to 10 cents, and never looked back with all the rewards earned by staking this whole time and being in profit, that puts me in a sweet spot to just dump all of my "free" Hive coins and sail off into the sunset. But I don't. Why?
I paint this picture for you, so you know I come to you, not as some desperate underwater baghodler seeking one last exit pump, or some venture capitalist who got an insider deal from some founder who broke off a chunk of the ol' premine; no, I come to you as pure as one could. I am "free" to do as I please whenever I please.
I made a meme.
I may not know how to code, but I did research and learned all about the tech, it's like if you point to a car part, I can tell you what it is, what it does, but if you told me to build you an engine you'd be outta luck.
But one could explain to me how each part worked, what it did for the car and made it work, and that would make sense. If one suddenly said you need some pixie dust and a flamethrower to get the engine started, it would raise some red flags.
Having a high fee-base layer for the sake that everyone can run a node is pretty ludacris, it turns out to be more centralized because you simply push infrastructure to layer 2 without an overarching incentive layer. That leads to giant web2 companies taking over as gatekeepers as we see in the current web 2.5 we are in today.
The mantra of "low fee = centralized" is very misplaced. That also goes for coin voting on PoS vs. DPoS. If you have coin voting, DPoS (on Hive) is magnitudes better than PoS in virtually every way, and I am happy to debate this topic. DPoS is very easy to get wrong, and I can give you a blanket rule for when DPoS has failed.
- If the chain has any top BPs that are crypto exchanges using custodial funds to vote for themselves.
If you have solved this issue, you have also solved many other issues and as long as the token distribution isn't centralized, you'll have a fair amount of censorship resistance.
Let's explore. Low fee can be achieved vis DPoS (Hive's version, the rest I have seen are fundamentally broken) and moving smart contracts to layer 2. PoS, where you get many nodes of varying qualities combined with layer 1 smart contracts, gives you very high fees and low performance. You'll hear "trade-offs! The bloody trade offs!" - but what are we really trading?
PoS requires you to put up significant capital to have a say in consensus on the network. This alone is a gatekeeper element locking out billions from ever participating in governance. High fees are the same, it makes the network unusable for billions of people worldwide, shutting them out from web3.
Those who do not have enough stake to join in consensus will delegate their stake to a staking pool. This inevitably leads to a handful of staking pools that control the network. Sure, the staking pools may have millions of individual stakers, but none of those tiny stakers get a say in operation, they can only withdraw, which simply gives them no voice at all.
Comparing this to DPoS on Hive, it does not take a rocket scientist to see what works best in practice. Hive handles more transactions than most top blockchains yet remains feeless, fast, and operational. While the PoS layer 1 smart contract approach has boasted high fees and high barriers to entry into governance.
Web3, to me, is distributed stake on coin voting systems. This means doing the hard work, money cannot buy this as frustrating as that part may be. No premine, No controller, Community run, and sustainable economics. The infrastructure must be disturbed, which Hive has done well, and with SPK Network, we will take that to the next level when it comes to how to incentivize what goes off-chain.
"We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure." - Moxie
The masses will always happily jump to the centralized 3rd parties for convenience. This is how it always plays out in practice, you can't change practice (human nature) you can only modify the theory.
We understand in practice a very tiny part of the population will run their own nodes, they much rather delegate that convenience. That is why PoW/PoS is dominated by large mining/staking pools. What Hive does is give the market what it wants but in a more decentralized, well packaged, and overall better way.
Voting is one of the oldest consensus methods in human history, its major flaws are not in its design, but in the avoidable corruption that takes place in practice as seen in insider sales, premines, and overall greed over decentralization.
Once the community controls the infrastructure, we are our own gatekeepers, matched with the Decentralised Hive Fund, we now have a sustainable way to pay developers to continue building the technology out. Scaling is almost paramount, and that has been the focus of Hive core since I've known them.
Nodes all can run, everyone, can participate in both the network itself and the network's consensus. Open source, no controlling actors of any kind in any part of the system, from token distribution to total infrastructure to overall node and backup node count. Long lockups on Hive combined with the month delay in voting in governance has thwarted one of the biggest threats to coin voting, exchanges using custodial funds to vote, good or bad, cannot be tolerated on any level.
Web3 is obvious when you use it. How many people on web 2.5 use the tech but do not participate in that base layer governance? I know so many Hivers, nondevs, vote for block producers that run the chain. It's unparalleled, unmatched anywhere out there. People worldwide having their say with their small stakes, but it matters. Either all votes matter or no votes matter.
All roads lead to Hive & SPK Network. Hive is an immutable backbone, the incentive tool, and SPK network, allowing anyone to provide infrastructure and get rewarded for it offchain. Now intermediaries become decentralized, cogs in the machine, if one goes down or acts up, another takes their place.
The example with @podping and @brianoflondon is a prime example of how this works. He is not what we would call an "insider" yet here is a guy who knows some coding, had an idea, saw an opportunity, and got it funded by the community. It is not getting Hive exposure as well as being a protocol that could be at the base of the Podcasting industry. How cool is that?
His service would not work on other blockchains. It would cost him a couple thousand a month in transaction fees alone. On Hive, it is fee-less.
So I am buying into where you are coming from. It seems the further down the road we go, the more the flaws in other systems is exposed. Many will survive and even excel, but as you stated, will exclude billions. They will cater to the "big boys" with the rest looking elsewhere.
Let us hope Hive steps up for the elsewhere.
@taskmaster4450le True!
@brianoflondon Has done some good work on the project Hive to lightning I tested it a few days ago with a few ideas in the back of my mind...
Because recently a store in my town started accepting bitcoin more here
So this bridge is going to help me for example to show people how easy is to exchange Hive to BTC and Real products...
Tnx to upvote
It is really amazing having such people in the blockchain to make it progress than what we are experiencing now and I believe more positive projects are still yet to happen as the team which I believe are working extremely hard to make sure success is achieved. This is throughly awesome and a work well-done in the platform.
Well, in a certain way I still like HIVE, otherwise I would have completely quit yet, but:
No, but a very high percentage of HIVE Power in very few hands.
For example Splinterlands is much more decentralizied with lots of different rather big SPS, DEC and card stakeholders.
Many (STEEM) early miners and former bid bot owners are now 'top witnesses' who are voting for each other, are mutually voting their proposals, lending each other their posting keys, are delegating HP to further anonymous alt accounts ... They completely control the chain and that's not what I would call "decentralized".
Even if Splinterlands has many more users (among them lots of wealthy investors) than are blogging on HIVE that fact doesn't manifest at all in 'top witness' ranks (even one of the Splinterlands founders isn't among the top 20).
Anyhow I like your enthusiasm nevertheless and respect your courage to invest your own money into HIVE. Even if I criticize HIVE I think it's just amazingly built from a technological point of view. Thus I will focus on dApps like Splinterlands and (maybe) also 'your' Ragnarok game (and concerning the blogging: well, lets see what future brings).
I don't buy that Hive has a controlling stake in a few hands. We have seen proposals that neither the top 5 stakeholders on Hive voted that still go put through with smaller stakeholder support.
Also, being an early miner in any protocol is going to have advantages. I know people who mined 50 BTC block rewards on a home computer. But over time, early miners sell. They got it fairly. This is an unavoidable circumstance when it comes to any system. But the early miners that end up not selling through the pumps are usually here for the long-term and people you want around anyway. Bidbot owners did nothing wrong, they played the game how it was best played to extract the most value. The game has changed and it is no longer profitable to run a bid bot, so they all switched to curating instead.
I don't know which witnesses you are saying that vote trade; be sure to point them out as that is not good behavior. Sure, top witnesses can vote for themselves, but they are not top witnesses from their vote alone, that is impossible with our distribution. Witnesses voting for each other is always going to happen, it does not mean it is bad, it means that they are choosing the best they feel to run the chain.
I am a top 5 stakeholder and have never reached the top 20 consensus as a witness, just shows further proof that your claims are not true, or at least at best true on a very low % base.
From their point of view they did nothing wrong. On the one side it is understandable that they tried to maximize their profits, but it is also true that they made sure not quality content was successful and 'trending' but paid content. So yes, I think it was 'wrong' (or at least bad for the platform and these content creators who didn't join that bidbot game), even if humanly understandable.
After bidbotting was more or less over, then curation sniping was the new trend: voting automatically after 3 or 4 minutes without reading anything to get the biggest piece of the curation cake. I really appreciate that after the last HF this curation problem got fixed, but the former bidbot owners and later curation snipers had had already plenty of opportunity to massively benefit.
I think early miners did nothing wrong at all. But that's not my point.
Apart from any moral aspect which might not matter here, both types of users are now dominating the chain.
Congrats, you really deserve that in my eyes! (And I am 'proud' #8 whale in Splinterlands now concerning collection power; that's where I finally decided to invest money which could have gone to HIVE instead, and where nobody had such a huge advantage from the beginning.)
You (and also @aggroed) are comparable new and in a certain way no members of the 'club' of witnesses which occupy the top ranks since the early STEEM days. There are mostly still the same names on top which I know since 2016/17!
I didn't mean to say witnesses are vote trading (sorry, in case I was not clear, but English is also not my mother tongue). I meant they vote each other for witnesses and thus make sure to control the chain.
I personally also don't like common non-transparent practices like creating anonymous accounts like for example @usain(down)vote, delegating them HP, let them downvote posts and rejecting every own responsibility, same with lending posting keys (these days for example 'you' flagged one of my chess posts without knowing it because someone else had used your posting key; I mentioned that in my last real post about 1.5 years ago).
I don't expect you to share my points of view and that's OK with me. I wish you much success and despite my criticism I hope that HIVE will thrive. Maybe one day I will try to post again.
Yes, I agree, this happens with all chains, and in fact pretty much all investments. Some will get in early; some of it is pure luck, some of it is folks who are busting their ass with market research and being active in communities. People are simply born at different times...nothing we can do about that!
And more broadly, there is no such thing as a perfect system, all monetary systems have flaws, it is unavoidable. And even MORE broadly speaking, there is no such thing as "fair", as everyone has different beliefs on what is fair or not. Nobody owes anyone anything, those that did well here at HIVE can control their votes and HP however they like, with no obligation to anyone.
Sure they can. And I can abstain from investing in HIVE if I think their behaviour doesn't contribute to a higher value of the HIVE token in the long term (and for example instead of that choose to become a Splinterlands whale).
I also don't owe HIVE anything and will criticize big HIVE stakeholders and the effect of their actions on the platform whenever I please.
Furthermore, I wouldn't really compare the situation of early Bitcoin investors (who have no option to harass smaller users) with the one of a social network.
Hi @theycallmedan
I am a newbie to everything in the crypto and development space.
Hive has sparked my interest in learning all I can about it.
I have tried to read posts and write ups like yours, but because I am not familiar with the lingo, most of the information just ends up flying over my head.
I discovered that I need a resource that could explain to me like I am 5, from the very beginning.
Please do you have any recommendations? 😭🥺
Thank you in anticipation.
I honestly can relate to this ! So many stuff to catch on here . I just guess as a newbie one just has to take things really slow and steady , ultimately we’ll be fine , Lol .
I just want to learn... As quickly as I can.
Not a bad idea anyway.
Crypto veteran since 2010 here. I have invested in and actively used over 40+ coins, and have researched probably 300+ coins over the years, and read 1000s of posts and articles, and even I have trouble learning and understanding everything. HIVE in particular is a great ecosystem, but it is the most complicated chain to actually USE that I have ever seen by a wide margin.
So dont feel bad if you dont understand everything my friend, because it is indeed complex.
I went ahead and followed you btw, its just 1 more follower, but lets try to boost your numbers. :)
@anarchistpreneur
I am most grateful for your help. People like you always reaffirm my faith in the Hive not just as a blockchain but more as a community where everyone can lend a hand.
Thank you again sir
"I am "free" to do whatever I want, whenever I want." - it's such a luxury to be able to say that, i'm glad you've achieved it! It also makes you independent, and that's so important. i'm excited to see how web3 and hive will develop in 2022, here's to many more great years of this blockchain!
One of the things I believe other chains have over us are clear leadership and vision. I am not saying we need a CEO but our "leadership" is largely not leading, happy behind the curtain, without any unified idea of where Hive is going which means the community doesn't know where Hive is going and that in turn means when Hive is communicated outside to interested parties, it is described as a blogging platform.
I was initially interested to hear money was set aside for marketing ... until I found out what it was being used for ...
This means DeSo, Rally, etc will get the attention and we will continue to languish, happy in the knowledge that they might be happy with their major exchanges and high valuations but they don't realize we have the best technology.
Even though I don't know much about Hive or Crypto itself. One thing I do know about and can say for sure, is that's one solid meme right there hahaha. 🥃
@theycallmedan
I see you man…
You are trying to create a history for internet here…
Decentralized data storage and share profit with the entire network…
And as you said everyone can participate….
I would like to understand more about what traffic is running thru the nodes..?
Cost of a node…?
Running a node expense…?
Also I’m not a technical as you but if I have someone to walk me tru the steps…
Namaste 🙏
Yo tampoco cuento con la habilidad de programar o no al nivel que quisiera, siempre he pensado que la participación positiva por mas pequeña que sea es igual de importante que el resto, algo a destacar o de mucha importancia es el sentido, la seguridad y la protección que le den las cabezas de los proyectos o quienes tienen mayor poder de voto y de decisión, justo esta semana tengo pensado participar con un nodo en la red de 3speak, quiza sea el mas pequeño pero quiero participar e ir escalando obvio siempre y cuando sea autosustentable o con la minina inversión, no gozo de gran autonomía económica, "el día de hoy" mañana uno nunca sabe.
Creo que has dejado muy claro cual es el potencial de Hive y los proyecto que de el emanen y es algo que esta a vista de todos, este es otro enorme beneficio de la cadena de bloques y de la economía en la cadena de bloques, todos podemos investigar de donde vienen y a donde van los ingresos de las personas con las que hacemos tratos, es decir aqui todos estamos sujetos al escudriño, no como en las negociaciones convencionales que no sabes si te estan vendiendo las joyas de la virgen y no sabes si de verdad don joyas o si la virgen realmente es tan virgen como dice serlo.
En el mundo de las criptomonedas o cadena de bloques todo es franco y derecho si todos estamos arriba todos lo estamos, si estamos por debajo de las cifras de soporte todos lo estamos, si quieres subirte al barco debieras saber que la verdad es mas cruda que las mentiras, el mercado baja y sube y te puedes llegar a marear, pero aqui nadie te engaña, los resultados siempre esta a vista de todos y proyectos como Hive y 3speak son sin duda algo que cambiara las formas de almacenar, producir, compartir, disfrutar y crear videos de una enorme comunidad.
I’ve got to catch up on all that I’ve missed, especially regarding how SPK and Hive benefit each other. Honestly, I’m way too overwhelmed with other stuff to be that involved in much at Hive right now, and certain things that happened t friends have been discouraging... but the potential of SPK, the hope that Leo will eventually drop a Twitter alternative, and mostly the friends I made that are still here, those are the three reasons I still try to stay involved.
Web 3 is already Adopted by various companies because it leads to enhanced product search functionality.
it a sematic web technology that will emerge on the day-to-day mechanisms of trade and our daily lives will behandled by machines talking to machine. And I think that's the future we're waiting for.
For a nondev you are so clued up like a dev!
Small stake, huge stake, medium stake. All can participate in governance and funding significant projects on the chain. Like you said, we're our own check and balance. It's still a steal to realise how feeless this chain is. I guess we might not have gotten there as the most lucrative Chain, but the way the chain works, we're breaking standards even set by us.
Very interesting. I still have a lot of concepts to understand, but I like Hive. I only have one complaint: the curators and creators of content in Spanish are a bit behind. I hope I can contribute.
That last line sounds like something the borg would say.
(snap of upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ea/I_Borg_Star_Trek_TNG_HD.jpg)
and yes, I agree with all you said.. master, not jack..
That's how web3 onboarding feels.
Be ready! :P
This almost made me speechless . . . What a vision!
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Web 3 - a huge beam of light shone on the misty darkness centralized crypto ecosystem exudes. So many opportunities to be grabbed on a purposeful platform as web 3 . It’s about time for the revolution!!
Hi, I am new to the community. I am learning and hope to learn and interact with many people. Congratulations on your achievements. Greetings.
Congratulations @theycallmedan! You received a personal badge!
See you at the next Power Up day to see if you will repeat this feat.
May the Hive Power be with you!
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