Embrace the Hive

cause it's not going anywhere.

I wanted to write a little bit of a different post today talking about Hive and the ecosystem as a whole, it may give some of you some ideas of how you can contribute to the space and be rewarded in the same turn for your contributions other than the regular "post and be active".

Seeing how popular the community both on Hive and irl of "Hive Sucre" is becoming really excites me cause it means a lot of different things for our place. We have merchants there accepting Hive and HBD directly and easily through apps such as Hive Keychain created by @stoodkev and @yabapmatt. At the same time customers are able to turn some of their rewards into various products directly without having to rely on exchanges and other middleman fees. That in and of itself is such a huge step that it's difficult to talk about all the details in one post.

Of course that's not something possible in every country but in many it is and I'm looking forward to see it grow over many different cities and communities over time. I think as a whole, crypto is becoming adopted in more places, even though Hive is only a small part of that it does "win" by other crypto becoming more regular. We've seen El Salvador for instance completely legitimize and incentivize people using BTC and even though we here aren't big fans of BTC and Lightning Network as we usually don't see much use for it, we still have options to use Hive through LN networks and merchants or payment providers that accept LN could easily accept our Hive through services provided by @brianoflondon. For instance, if I wanted to buy a certain subscription of a streaming service or some gift cards for Steam to buy certain games, I'd only need to check for a merchant like g2a that accepts BTC/LN and be able to send Hive directly through @v4vapp and get the corresponding BTC through within minutes. Naturally this would be even better if they accepted Hive directly but knowing how unknown Hive still is to the rest of the world this is an acceptable method for now.

If they were to accept Hive or HBD directly though, there's quite a few advantages in doing so. One of them being the lack of fees and ease of use, transferring Hive/HBD costs close to no RC so even if the merchant account only transfers HBD many times per day he'd never run into RC issues, but naturally if they were to need more they'd be known enough to other hivers for RC delegations to come in to assist. Another thing is, that while big exchanges don't accept HBD, merchants could easily and simply trade their HBD for Hive on the internal market (with no fees) and then send them off to Binance or other exchanges to convert to fiat or what have you. If they're not in a rush, though, and either through curiosity or by customers or posts telling them that they can earn APR by placing the HBD into savings, many I believe would really enjoy doing so, even if it's just smaller amounts like the profits they received in a trade or deal. Naturally now early on there's some risk since HBD doesn't have that much demand and the Hive ecosystem is still pretty small that the peg may not always be pegged, but the more customers and merchants to make use of this currency the more volume and utility it would have thus generating more and more liquidity for the token which enforces stability.

Now off to talk about something else but using Hive Sucre as an example. I talked to @jonsnow1983 a few days ago and was surprised that some of this activity had already started taking place even before my suggestions. That is that if merchants like being paid in HBD because it means it's more stable than their local currency and it means less fees involved doing things this way, they'd also be encouraged to want more customers to pay them in HBD. How do you encourage customer's to pay in HBD if they don't have any, though? Well that's not that difficult neither. The merchant would simply need a way for new customers to quickly create a hive account and as a trial period post something into their community or on their "page" and receive an upvote or two. Naturally they could even set some things up where if you pay with HBD you'd get discounts if you want people already involved in crypto to buy some HBD to use that instead of another one but even without putting pressure on the merchants to force some discounts if the new Hive users would be directed to a community and post something as simple as a review of the store or service of the merchant they could get rewarded for their social activity. Which in turn could lead to their next visit to that store them being able to buy a coffee or drink for "free" with the rewards they earned for their review last week. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well it is in Hive's case.

Think about it from this perspective. Hive as a social media platform built around one token needs more users. I'd go so far as to say that's all it ever will need because that's what's going to drive everything else towards it like speculators, investors and potentially also advertisers eventually. There's a lot of people who keep saying "okay but how much are these users going to power up/ how many of them are going to keep their rewards/ etc", that doesn't matter that much in my opinion. If you believe Hive and all its advantages it gives users will grow, it's going to be their loss if they never held anything and looked to sell everything they could that they earned. Hive's inflation is quite limited and is decreasing in amounts yearly, don't focus too much on that. Sure it means that distribution isn't as good as it could be but I'm sure we could focus more on that in different ways than judging people only by if they keep or don't keep their earnings.

Either way, point being, if your activity is directly causing more people to join the ecosystem, it should be rewarded in one way or another. Either through the rewardspool or through the DHF in some ways imo. Both the DHF and Hive itself win if it spends its resources on making sure this place is growing in activity and naturally all other stakeholders as well.

In the future I'd love to see the DHF not just funding developers or random marketing attempts but also a wide variety of activities such as the Hive Sucre ones where more and more merchants are accepting HBD and customers are in love with spending their HBD this way. It makes for a great experience for everyone involved.

Something else I'd like to see more of in the near future is where merchants have their own communities, treat them as some kind of relationship with their customers where they can leave reviews/comments towards the merchants and in exchange the merchants can announce news/discounts/etc. Everyone upvoting each others comments and posts and it generating a lot of "discounts" if they know a lot of these customers will continue to purchase things from their services. Now let's go one step further. We're seeing more and more stores and companies offer "loyalty points" towards customers, "get our card and we'll track how many coffee's you've bought and we'll give you the 10th one for free", etc. Now imagine being able to cheaply and easily create your own tokens or directly use Hive/HP as a means for collaboration there between brand and customer. Say if you're delegating 1k HP towards this brand they'll offer you direct discounts to their coffee when paying with Hive or even a coffee per week for free for delegating while they use your delegation to curate comments, reviews, blogs, vlogs, selfies, etc, of customers using their products or just visiting their shops, etc.

Ait, probably a good time to get back to the present here but you can see that there's a lot of "acceptable" ways to use this ecosystem and for it to be of advantage to everyone involved. As long as you don't start going into the gray area too much with borderline abusive activities, the community will embrace most of the usecases you bring forth and as long as your activities as a merchant and customer are bringing in more users and giving our token and the ecosystem more utility, it'll all be good and worth whatever value is spent along the way.

Of course not everyone will agree with me here but I think it's something we might be moving towards in the near future of how we can use our upvotes more nonchalantly as long as we know the underlying activity brings us all more value long-term.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Images from Pixabay.com, keyword search: customers