Hive witnesses are pretty weird.
- They are block producers.
- They are sort of like politicians.
- It's kind of like an oligarchy (that can be voted out instantly).
- There isn't a lot of competition to get into the top 100, so far.
- But there's a ton of competition to get top 20.
- We depend on them to run this entire shabang.
But what will Hive look like in five or ten years?
What's the ten year plan? I'd honestly say that decentralized architecture lacks any kind of real plan. We have several centralized agents all doing their own thing and trying to build value around here, and it all comes together to create a weird mishmash of decentralization and flat architecture. Think about pouring water on a table: the water goes everywhere; it has no direction. Every path is explored. Such is blockchain, especially during these early stages.
Scaling up.
Still, the way that Hive is built is very strange. We give all the power to those that are best at allocating capital and retaining value within the system. In essence, ten years down the line, Hive will almost certainly be controlled by twenty billionaires running twenty different massive companies. Gone will be the days that a single person could ever hope to attain a top 20 spot on the roster. Obviously this is both a good and a bad thing. However, we can't stop this evolution from happening. This is just how Hive is built.
Granted, I suppose some "genius" could come along and claim a top 20 spot for himself. I'm sure if Dan came back and was giving 100% he'd easily make it into a top spot. After all, he build the entire core of this system. His knowledge is extensive. I won't hold my breath on that front. He is a worldbuilder, and this world has been built, and I thank him for that.
The point is Hive has chosen a hybrid path.
We are trying to be as centralized as we can while still attempting to avoid the corruption that legacy systems encounter. No easy feat but it should be interesting nonetheless. Also this is a network that anyone can build value permissionlessly. We obviously don't have to be a top 20 witness to make money here.
It stands to reason that if there is a witness team that has 10 people working for it and they are building a lot of value, they should easily make it into the top twenty. This is especially true considering front ends of Hive can easily force their users to vote for their witness (which I'm honestly surprised hasn't happened yet). If we continue on with this extrapolation it becomes clear that a witness with 100 devs would easily take away the top spots from any single person. Thus we can expect each top 20 witness to essentially become the equivalent of a mining pool. Rather than twenty people, it will be almost certainly 20 businesses or perhaps even 20 DAOs with their own token and frontend/service. I expect gaming to be quite popular on Hive. NFTs are the future of gaming. Yada Yada Yada.
But think about how crazy that would be.
Imagine Hive at like $100 or even $1000 per token because the top 20 witnesses are all thriving businesses. Would be pretty wild indeed, and this is exactly what I expect to happen.
Now add the fact that decentralized development turns users into employees.
Get paid to _____.
This is the next thing we must consider. Not only will witnesses be thriving businesses, but also the users themselves become essentially conscripted employees of these frontends/tokens. Imagine being able to craft a skin in a game. Maybe it's a sword in an RPG or a hippy flower necklace, doesn't matter what it is. What matters is who owns it. The user that created the skin owns the skin. Thus the centralized company who develops the product outsources ownership and development to the community itself and can scale up to massive levels.
Conclusion
So think about a top 20 witness that has between 100 and 1000 'real' & 'official' employees, but they also have a million unofficial users helping them build out their product as well. It becomes quite clear exactly how this thing we call WEB3 can scale to enormous levels that no traditional corporation could ever hope to replicate.
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As long as a latté doesn’t cost $1400 by then, cool. 😅
On a small scale, this is already happening. @blocktrades is more than just Dan Notestein and I think that at least a few other top witnesses have posted I’m hiring notices.
very true.
Also if a latte costs $1400 governments are being overthrown all over the world.
Kazakhstan got overthrown with an x2 price of gas.
Imagine an x10 price of everything.
The USA knows damn well they need to keep citizens placated with distraction.
People with nothing to lose have a tendency to lash out quite unpredictably.
This is especially true in countries where live has been relatively easy and people feel entitled to their easy life.
It's all relative. Relatively matters quite a bit.
I honestly don't see any sound logic behind voting someone in simply because they, believe in something. All that politicking nonsense/bullshit won't get folks far. Businesses or brands, yeah, and we already see that happening I think because it's only natural and, makes sense.
Not a fan of forcing votes though. That's just a fancy way of shooting yourself in the foot. If a mall has 1000 shops but you're only allowed to enter 30, the entire mall suffers. Or people will simply swap votes any time they want to use a frontend, for example, making what would have been a self-destructive barrier of entry just a joke and the witness votes practically meaningless.
Hm yeah I didn't say it was a good idea only that someone will definitely try it.
Also Hive has no KYC so anyone would be able to easily circumvent this 'tax' by using another account that had no HP. Your example also assumes that every single witness is doing this, which is clearly impossible on a statistical level. Even 50% is basically impossible on a statistical level based solely on the unpopularity of that kind of force. Sounds like a boycott waiting to happen.
I was thinking, scaled up, well beyond numbers seen today. But yes, it would most likely backfire before even getting to that point.
It's also quite possible that the users lost from imposing such a rule end up costing the dapp more than the value of their vote.
Lot's of weird edge-cases to consider.
Would be a mess. But I can see people naturally and voluntarily supporting the brands they use. People already do that. Promotes healthy competition. If it fails to meet expectations the business loses more than just a few customers.
Much more likely that some kind of bonus would be issued to those that upvote the witness.
(Rather than forcing the vote)
People are more likely to respond positively to positive reinforcement.
Like maybe you get to mint a free NFT or something.
Of course it has to be based on vote strength to avoid Sybil attack.
Devil is in the Details.
I think a business makes more sense in a way. They know that they are providing a service and being paid for it. So we are more likely to see more people running things consistently. At the same time, they won't want their witness to be out of order because it means that they are losing money and we should see more stability.
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Any actual business would also refrain from the slander & libel, threats, personal attacks, and other terrible PR moves that many of the top witnesses and the whales who appoint them take part in regularly.
Well...actual businesses have been doing the "get woke, get broke" stuff so I don't even know. I would prefer it if they focused more on their business instead of trying to get brownie points.
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My witnesses include an address and at least two people who would greet you at the door.
24/7/365 uptime with again 2 IT support officials.
I favor the idea of Witnesses as DAOs.
This is something I proposed elsewhere. It is a great way to decentralize even further. Create a DAO which everyone buys into. This provides the start up cost to cover when the node isnt making money. To cover the technical end of things, perhaps gift some tokens in the DAO to the person (people) handling that.
Then we have a node that is "owned" by a number of different people. Of course, as you elaborated upon, this all could be tied to a much larger business or platform.
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we running into a weird world of communism run by democracy. Everyone will be able own a share of something wether it be land or property or business. It will be run via democracy and owned by everyone.
This is so weird. I've been thinking along very similar lines with a slight twist.
All new technology evolves.
Remember the steam engine? It was almost 100 years before someone decided to put wheels under it and create the locomotive.
Look how far crypto has come in 12 years. Our current governance system is not perfect but we still have one account is one vote.
With the transparency of the blockchain we can all see if some one entity is playing shenanigans?
Who knows where we will be in 10 years?
Well done on an excellent thought experiment.
Thanks for this piece of information. I know Dan is a great guy, but I didn’t know that he played such a significant role in building Hive.
That’s a great vision! With all the increasing value performed by Dapps and their devs, and with the support of vibrant communities, no one can really say how high Hive can soar.
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or maybe they will just try to make sure that witnesses are doing a good job at witnessing and let the semi anonymous people around the world do it.
there is a much bigger chance that someone will try to sue a big company for hosting some weird text in block 12541254 then suing some weird guy in Serbia.
How does one sue a big company that is a DAO and isn't registered as in LLC?
What if that DAO is also DPOS and all decisions are made via stake voting?
Also, every node hosts the weird text in block 12541254.
Who is responsible for that text?
The person that wrote and signed it?
The witness that put it into a block?
Or the network of hundreds of servers that save it forever?
well if company is a DAO then that is another talk 😀
Even their employees are stakeholders and not employees. Everyone gets the benefits for doing their part. I wonder what if some famous celebrity start their own official witness. Can they win the votes here with the level of influence they have on the outside world? or will they have to use their technical & social skills to get to the top like the current witnesses do.
Also, In about 10 years, do we only see hardcore crypto people, developers and dapp owners as witnesses? What about a non-technical person?
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I could definitely imagine a strong community builder as a top 20 witness.
Someone who doesn't have any technical ability but they are really good at supporting the network and the tokens on the network.
It's a hard one because you want to ensure the top witnesses care about the blockchain are competent and won't run away if things melt down.
I think competition will arise when the sectors skill set rises. Hopefully we don't end up with maniacs.
It took me a hot second when you said "if Dan came back," because my brain went, "@theycallmedan left??" ...and then I realized, oh, he means Larimer. 😂
I think we have a ways to go before we end up like EOS and have a bunch of wild groups controlling the consensus witnesses. I look forward to the days we get there but I also don’t, it means that there’s a lot more attention and I would like to think we could handle it as a community and chain but could we at this moment? Hard to tell.
I think it would be sweet to have a bunch of DAO’s up on the top 20, I’d try and participate in that!
This is a glimpse into the very distant future. When Hive decides to 100X (could be in half a year)... the whole game changes drastically. I hope witnesses are taking notes.
Token price can x100 but network growth certainly can't.
That's when you know for sure the market is overvalued and you should sell to buy back in.
Coincidentally enough that could be one way someone makes it to the top 20 (just by trading correctly).
One wrinkle is even with a staff behind them, it’s still partly a popularity contest so other than “to use our app you must vote us as witness” they’ll not get a top 20 spot just through investing in a team. They could however get there with bribery or coercion, or just by buying out someone who already has a top spot. Hive partly exists through such shenanigans happening on the previous platform …
Hm yeah but what happens when your a company with like 10M Hive and you're bringing massive value to the network? There's legit no way for that to be a thing without that entity being a top 20 witness. That's a very easy way to win the "popularity contest". It turns out that mooning the token price is a pretty popular thing to do.
Interesting that Aggroed, who runs by far the most successful project on Hive (Splinterlands accounting for 90+% of all Hive activity, and 99% of active users) can't make it to the top 20, because he's not supported by the whales.
Heh, "interesting".
You know as well as I do that if Aggroed was a woke lefty he'd probably be in the top five. But at the same time there are very big problems with HE. It's very centralized and the 1% entry/exit fee creates a lot of friction.
When he personally asked for my vote and was campaigning a bit at rank 21 he made it into the top 20 with relative ease for a while. His rank has been very on again off again, likely because of the Qanon adjacent politics. Still, he brings a lot of value to Hive and I think it's fair to say that all groups should have some kind of representation here.
Ah look at that it was basically a year ago Feb 10, 2021.
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Some of the witness votes will expire in June - and I think we're going to see a big shake-up in the top 20. Especially those witnesses who have hitherto relied on votes from inactive accounts.
Some interesting thoughts here. Hive is weird and beautiful. Will definitely be interesting to see how it scales over the course of 10 years.
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Crazy this will be happening, when major institutions grabs hive. Price will jump like mad especially with the various sinks already existing in the blockchain
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Just that there's alot of opportunity in Hive.
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Imagine having witnesses that actually do something other than validating blocks, lel.
But nooo, we have legitimate idiots within top 20
10% actually do something, others do nothing and everyone seems to be ok with it. Lel
I am also a Witness, I can't make a living out of it.
However, since I have completely changed my life and with the help of different validators and Witness servers I can live on it and make ends meet with a few euros a month.
As soon as a vote is more or less inside, I notice that directly.
But I don't do it for the money. I had already built up the Witness when I was an employee and also paid completely myself.
Besides, I also build up other pillars and try to get through so :)
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“Now add the fact that decentralized development turns users into employees.” - this is such an important and profitable feature of hive . This alone will create a viable source of income for individuals who come across this great opportunity.
You definitely think outside the box and has given everyone food for thought. Once the value of Hive rises I can see some serious competition for the top 20 slots happening. Hive at $10 is a different beast to one that is at $1 and we are talking life changing money in the future.
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I would love to see a biggest downvoter(anti-abuse person) becoming a witness.
Oh, are you still here?
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