While many are 'away' at HiveFest, this might not be the best time to post this (or anything for that matter), but I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and as I've mentioned in the past, once something gets stuck in my head, I need to get it out before I can reasonably move on.
What have I been thinking about?
The price of HIVE.
Now, look. I buy into the idea that there is more to HIVE than price. In fact, I think its true value lies in its ultimate utility. And I think much has been done to make it faster, more scalable, more secure, and reliable, and more work will be done as far as all of that goes. As will be more attention put to making things easier for developers to integrate their apps, and at some point, make it more user intuitive when it comes to onboarding and the overall user experience.
All good, needful things.
Also, I would rather that price in dollars, or satoshis, or whatever else there is to measure value by, wasn't a thing. Speaking only for myself, when I see the amount of HIVE I have staked versus the dollar amount I can't help but sigh. It doesn't matter how much I have staked, that dollar amount doesn't seem to budge. I grow stake, the amount either stays the same or goes down.
In other words, it's disheartening.
So, while the value of HIVE isn't just in its dollar amount, I can't totally discount it, either.
Not when so many other cryptocurrencies, many of them less capable than HIVE, are valued above HIVE.
Yeah, that could be for a number of reasons, and not all of them are desirable. Without knowing the details of every cryptocurrency, it's hard to know. And just because the value is higher now, doesn't mean all of those projects will still be around in the future. Sustainability is as important as utility.
As a strict investment, though, for me, it's still a losing proposition.
Even with the stake I've been able to build between buying STEEM/HIVE, earning through posting, commenting and curating, earnings on my stake, and converting my STEEM stake to HIVE, my stake is not valued at what I have invested. At the current price, I would need roughly 2.33 times more stake, or the price of HIVE to go up by that much, in order to just break even.
So, a little over 50,000 HP, (roughly Orca-sized) or the price of HIVE a little above $0.30 USD.
But who wants to just break even on an investment? I don't, just slightly less than I want to stay behind. So, I can continue to build stake through blogging or other opportunities HIVE currently provides, and I can do some more investing.
Realistically, that means at least another three years of sweat equity (give or take, since I don't know if that's a conservative estimate or still a longshot), or justifying spending money I don't really have at the moment. In reality, unless HIVE drops to a nickel or less, I'm not likely to buy a whole lot.
(And for the record, I'm kinda done with the low prices. I just don't see the benefit anymore, no matter how theoretically enticing the price might become to some big time investors. As is, relatively speaking, $0.13 USD is super cheap, thank you very much.)
Well, obviously, a lot can happen in three years. Just in the time I've been here, the price of STEEM/HIVE has hit an all time high north of $8.50, and fallen to under $0.09. The truth is, though, the price overall has been a lot closer to nine cents than nine dollars that entire time.
We're supposedly back in a crypto bull market. Bitcoin has moved up significantly, and has been setting new all time highs. And in the past, that has been good for alt tokens, too. Eventually. So, we'll see. We're nearing the end of 2020, and a lot of hope and promise is being poured into 2021.
Sorry, I can't be as optimistic as some. However, nor can I be so pessimistic as others. Generally, reality and truth lie somewhere in between.
And really, as far as HIVE price goes, I don't need a moonshot. I just want a new sustainable floor, say around 75 cents.
Is that too much to ask?
I hope not. Not when other tokens are currently at least 10 times greater in dollar value than HIVE. Just taking a look at the top 25 on Coinbase by price (excluding yearn.finance and Wrapped Bitcoin):
Bancor Network Token sits at $1.36.
Celo, $1.63.
Tezos at $2.37.
EOS, HIVE's cousin, at $3.09.
The OMG Network (what the heck is that), comes in at $3.28.
Uniswap, $3.99
Cosmos, $5.35. Synthetic Network Token, $6.23. Ethereum Classic, a knock off (or the original, if you prefer) still rates $6.46 per token. Band Protocol? $6.71.
I haven't heard of a lot of these, not that my knowledge of them matters. For one reason or another, they're still way above HIVE in price, and all are above in market cap.
UMA—$8.05. Chainlink—$13.71. Balancer—$14.37. Augur—$19.54. Numeraire—$27.01. Filecoin—$28.18. Zcash—$74.20. Aave—$91.51.
Dash, I've heard of. $109.31. Litecoin, obviously. $121.78. Don't know Compound, $158.07. Maker, yes. $575.65. Then, Ethereum at $664.43 and at the top of the list, Bitcoin. $23,966.44.
Now that I've posted the list, I ask you, how about 75-cent HIVE? Of course, I'd love more, but let's get a little light at the end of the long dark tunnel first. Right now, after months of HIVE being at $0.25 and below, and STEEM around that since this time two years ago, it does seem like a big ask, even if it really shouldn't be.
There would still be a lot of work to do. I can't retire on 75-cent HIVE. Truth be told, just to maintain our current upper lower class lifestyle (or lower middle class, take your pick—either way, we're talking about $40,000 net, a year), we'll need at least $1.6 million USD over the next 40 years, which doesn't really account for inflation or taxes. That's more like $2.0 to $2.25 million.
That means, realistically, I'm looking at at least Orca-sized stake and $45 HIVE, or various combinations thereof. In other words, still Orca-range stake and somewhere between Filecoin and ZCash pricing.
Personally, I don't think that's a big ask, either, but it sure seems to be for everyone else. We're still in a world based on scarcity, so Bitcoin is king.
Dumb, but true.
Some tendencies die hard.
I'd settle for being able to make a living wage in HIVE and using exclusively HIVE to pay all my bills, too, by the way. I think that's way possible, too, absolutely necessary given the state of the world and where it's headed, but we're nowhere near that either, and it seems less likely to happen to me before $45 HIVE.
One way another, though, I'm past ready for some upward, sustainable movement in HIVE price.
Image sources—Crypto Logos and Pixabay
I think a lot of investor thought would like to see Hive's price a little bit higher. I think Hive will get there one day, and while the investor side does not really care to much about the social side, I think the social side can do a lot for Hive. Unlike most so called social style web sites, the likes of FB and YT and even Medium, Hive is a true social network, the others I see as anti-social networks. Hive has so much less trollish and bullying activity that it stand on the social scale way above most others.
It will take time, but as various parts are built and tied together, Fixed page descriptions of up coming events with the countdown timer, then the live stream post with side by side chat capability and thumbs up style or thumbs down style on comments in the chat as if on a Dbuzz style post limit of earnings .50 hive, small groups like on youtube could have serious chats and then have the commentors be rewarded for participation with small Hive amount so long as they did not tick to many people off.
Still it would be nice to see that $0.75 Hive price.
Hey, @bashadow.
You would think that investors would like to see some upward price movement. We've been trending sideways or down for so long if they wanted to buy in at low prices they would have done it by now. As it is, I'm conflicted about big investors, or institutional investing anyway. There will be governance issues either way, and regulatory issues that I don't think are in the best interests of any cryptocurrency that actually intends to be used as currency rather than just as an appreciable asset or investment.
re: HIVE
I think you're one of the few people who have actually said HIVE or STEEM before it is actually social. I believe it to be so, too, but the community does a lot of its socializing off the platform, in Discord. Still, as a community its all of those things you say it is, and much better than Twitter for sure, and while I think Facebook is better than Twitter, both have their censorship issues, not to mention what they do with user data and posts.
re: time
Yeah. I'm getting impatient in my middle age. :) There's a lot of good things going. I tried to acknowledge that. There needs to be a balance. All of that work needs to be done AND there needs to be more people to use it.
Unfortunately, people aren't going to see what's under the hood. They're just going to expect that it all work. What they will see are the front ends, and while there are some that are truly trying to create a better user experience, all of what you mentioned and more needs to come to pass.
re: price
It amazes me that three years in I'm willing to settle for something still under a buck, as long as it's at least 75 cents. :)
I actually do see growth for Hive as a currency and as a social platform. We are one Hard Fork away from being completely severed with the past called steem. When we get our own decaying witness selection retention process I think that is when we will see Hive making gains to around $1.50. I look at the gains and the inroads that apps like PeakD, and LeoFinance, and MSP waves radio, are doing, and then the increased use of and general liking of the NFT showrooms for artist, we are getting some real use cases for the people that have and use and enjoy Hive.
There has been no rush to fix what is not really broken, it may not work perfect but the reward pool does work. Every hardfork prior to Hives first stand-alone Hard fork on steem seemed to be attempts to fix and jury-rig the reward pool. I just hope the people of Hive can continue to avoid that until everything has a more solid foundation. Something that prospective developers can count on not changing every 2 or 3 months.
I think Hive will be at or very close to it's ATH on the first anniversary, and we should be very close to settling the witness selection and retention system by then.
It's Crypto so anything can happen.
A 75 cent FLOOR would be awesome.
A lot of us feel that Hive is undervalued, but the fact remains that it's frequently the only red coin in my Blockfolio.
I don't get it, it's got so much utility.
But it is also a 'this is just around the corner' coin.
The way things have gone the last couple of years I'll settle for a 12 cents floor!
Hey, @revisesociology.
It could always get worse, that's for sure, and having any kind of floor would be nice.
It seems like STEEM and now HIVE has always been more development first, marketing last, except for the wrong kind of marketing, which, truth to tell, brought a lot of people here in earlier days. Totally messed with expectations and a lot of people left, but they did come to check things out at least.
Crypto is in the clenched jaws of get rich quick, even though it's only the big investor right now that's going to be making big gains. And since many tokens, like HIVE and STEEM, haven't really seen any of that big investor money, who can even say it's ever going to come? Which is fine with me. We've had governance issues as it is. We don't need mammoth whales of a scale we've never seen before carving up the blockchain.
What we do need is some folks bringing their businesses here and finding a way to finance all of their production through HIVE. Big ask and big task, but there it is all the same. :)
A 1$ hive would be great!
Hey, @dalz.
Yes, it would. And so doable. It just needs to happen. However that happens.
I think HIVE has yet much to do before it reached it’s full potential. There are good ideas but execution is still deficient. I have a lot of faith in what this will become but no rush as it probably still needs some time to become ripe.
Hey, @fenngen.
Yeah, I agree, there's still plenty to be done. And yet, I can't believe that all of these other tokens don't have their own issues and deficiencies.
I also agree there are plenty of good ideas. Burning some ninja-mined stake, decreasing practical inflation, doing some marketing, making it easier to onboard and use HIVE—I'm sure there's more ideas than that but any or all of those would be nice to try.
I still have hope for HIVE, but I don't have faith in where the rest of the world is and what they're capable of. Time is running out. I don't think we have 10 years to ripen. We might be fortunate if we have five.
Well if we don’t have time the we’re already fucked haha, things do move at incredible speed these days though.