A Decentralized Hive Story

What's been going on?

I'm not that eloquent and I keep myself busy so I haven't written much here on the blog. This blog was originally supposed to be a frontend and all in all, that's a selfish type of vision that was. First there was this idea to create a new frontend, then to make it into a forum, then all kinds of other things and we went like this from 2017 when this account was launched until probably late into 2018, long after the witness was launched. [Don't let your witness votes expire, take a moment before accepting whatever effect this post will have on your mind or possibly sanity]

There's a point where building something that suits yourself stops being interesting and building something that suits everyone else becomes important. The modified Condenser running somewhere, this and that, it's there but it doesn't matter. I got more involved in the pre-Hive days as a witness but still in a removed way. I built out the veterans community, was and still am part of the silver gold community, a strange guy who turned out to be a woman convinced me to join what became the Hivewatchers, and I somehow got into Lucksacks although I don't touch cards to gamble in reality.

The real change even as we were all going through the start of the hostile takeover wasn't helping set up communications, or contributing or anything else but I'd say looking back, it was when the Foundation was invited to participate in that public discussion with Justin Sun and I said, let me be the rep from that end. In retrospect I could've said a lot more things at that debate but there was no script. Like everyone else I was already on full-time but I'd say, in a personal type of deliberation, that was it. I'm a guy who likes to be in the background, I do what I do, I'm hard of hearing these days especially which isn't doing anyone around me any favors, and I like working in teams. [Cue the philosophy]

I believe you have to support your team, be there for your team, back them up, make them look good if you can help them. It's said the military is the biggest team in the world. No matter what army you're a part of, you still understand how it's like for the allies or enemies, because essentially everyone is in some semblance of the same type of team. Now I think otherwise. The largest team in the world is decentralized. It's the most powerful team, more than any military alone and even if all armies of the world banded together in some soup of dysfunctional unity, they'd never be able to destroy a truly decentralized entity. Because that entity draws power from its decentralization. It's members are a team without being a centralized item; they are driven to cohesion by their diversity and individuality. They are connected through a vision which is different and the same for everyone. Like I said, that team is unbeatable. To me, that's Hive.

I'm not writing this to gain any favors from anyone and I can prove anything I say. I'm here every single day, doing some task, helping organize promotional events, being grateful for taking accounting two years in a row in college which was before most of you were born (there were no disruptive improvements to accounting in that time, no worries), dealing with infrastructure, organizing, and a lot of people would probably really want to never hear from me again at this point. I said it before, its enjoyable to be part of Hive. And in those paragraphs above I told you why. And (anther and) I like what I do and I will talk about what I do and I take it seriously. And, no worries, seriously, don't worry if you don't like me much, if I wasn't here someone else would replace me, I'm not considering myself special, we're all a team. And ... and that's likely too many ands now.

Hive is the very epitome of a decentralized power driven by a common vision and not by any other force. It's a blockchain but it's not driven by money or by some other of personal gain despite the protocol-based reward mechanisms. The people answering new member questions on Discord don't do it for money. They're there. No one's curating anyone on Discord. No one's giving anyone anything in a two hour discussion about how to rewrite some slides. No one's paying them to bring up Web3 at the dinner table with extended family as their spouse facepalms (no, not speaking from personal experience, I keep quiet in those). It's all simply the desire of people in different countries who speak different languages to be part of something tied by a greater vision.

People who get tired of my ands tell me no one cares about Hive. But it's 2am here now and I care, and its morning in Ghana and someone there cares, and its time to clock off work in Thailand and someone cares and so on. It's impossible for Hive to exist if no one cared and there is a vision. And (here's another and) that vision is contagious. It creates this massive, immeasurable, decentralized team that's not a team by any standard definition of a team but is still a team. Decentralization will always beat centralization. There are a lot of malicious assholes stealing keys through phishing, exploiting through botnets, targeting dapps, and so on. Some on chain, some off chain. When you build something there will always be someone out there acting out of greed or malice. But with decentralization Hive is made resilient. It survived that hostile takeover. There's never been another case like this one. But now there will be, and that inspiration towards the future is still a part of Hive, because for there to be someone to follow, someone has to pave the way. And Hive paved the way not in a straight line but in many linear, non-linear, abstract and so on shapes and forms.

Now I've said my piece and I'll go sleep, that's what's going on.