I've been seeing some absolutely delusional comments from Hive stakeholders lately, some forwarded to my DMs on Discord. While I haven't been a stakeholder since 2018, I still hope to see Hive do well. But before that, it's imperative that witnesses, developers, users and stakeholders of Hive accept some hard truths. If you remain in denial, Hive is destined to fail. I don't expect anyone to actually read this, or change any minds, but I'll do it for myself so I don't have to think about this anymore.
So, here are some facts:
The STEEM token is arguably the greatest failure in crypto history. Once a #3 coin, it now languishes at #132. Compared to ETH, it has lost 1,000 times its value, or 99.9%. Its fork, HIVE, is even worse, crashing out of the top 150.
Both STEEM and HIVE are a ticket straight down to hell. Both tokens have seen price appreciation for very short durations, spending a majority of their life crashing against BTC, ETH and fiat.
Steem network represents the greatest consensus failure in crypto history. While PoW networks have been 51% attacked in the past, absolutely nothing has been attacked and centralized for 9 months and running (probably forever). DPoS is a complete joke in the broader crypto world, and no one with any significant value will trust the tarnished security reputation of Hive.
Even if one did like DPoS for some insane reason (well, free transactions is the only one), EOS offers a far superior solution. They have significantly more mature tooling, billions in the war chest, and are working on strong ethereum interoperability and compatibility. While very centralized too, its 20 consensus BPs are reputable entities. Should mention that even with all of that, EOS has also been an abject failure, with bitcoin and ethereum doing several orders of magnitude greater economic activity. But if there was one DPoS chain that has any chance of building a sustainable niche for itself, it's EOS, and it will do this by becoming a complement and friend to ethereum and bitcoin, rather than trying to take any market share. Anyone who thinks they can "kill" ethereum or bitcoin is out of their mind.
Layer 2 is not layer 2 without layer 1 security. No one, NO ONE, or at least no one with any common sense, will use Hive when actual Layer 2 solutions are available on ethereum.
HIVE will likely still see some pumps and dumps, but I hope you'll take advantage of them to exit the market. If you are triggered by this, I would highly recommend hiring a financial advisor for an unbiased opinion on your investment. Hopefully, 4.5 years of very steep losses will be enough to get you to do the right thing. If you're still delusionally stubborn, you should definitely visit a psychiatrist instead. I have been telling people for years now to be very careful powering up STEEM and now HIVE, and received a ton of hate and grief for that. While I don't expect any apologies, I continue to recommend people to look elsewhere - the risk-adjusted returns for HIVE or STEEM are simply abysmal. Outside of quick short-term scalps, this token is useless.
With only 25-30 witnesses on Hive actually breaking even, Hive is on the verge of a complete security meltdown. Luckily, I don't think this is a short-term risk, because cultists suffer from insane sunk-cost fallacy and are happy to keep their fantasies on life support at big losses, but it's not sustainable long-term. (PS: This is the only bit here that is inaccurate. Depending on your server set up, if you only run one server without a backup or seed node, you may be turning a profit up to #50-#60. However, the point stands.)
So what can Hive do to turn things around?
First port of call will be cancel the reward pool, decrease inflation to the bare minimum to keep the chain running. I have more thoughts on how a complete overhaul can take place with a brand new UX, but maybe some other time. Become a bonafide sidechain solution for ethereum (NO, THIS IS NOT LAYER 2. LAYER 2 REQUIRES SECURITY CONSENSUS OF ETHEREUM. I REPEAT, LAYER 2 IS NOT LAYER 2 WITHOUT LAYER 1 SECURITY) by offering a focus on social media and gaming. This requires complete interoperability and compatibility with ethereum and EVM. Why would anyone choose Hive over established DPoS chains like Tron or EOS, though, if they can develop better interop faster? Good question, and I don't have an answer for that. My only hope is that with strong marketing, Hive can build a brand and sustainable niche for itself targeted towards gaming and social. That said, with Immutable now launching a zk Rollup on ethereum with 0.3 second finality, thousands of TPS and <$0.01 in transaction fees, Tron/EOS have their work cut out, let alone Hive.
Build actual layer 2 solutions on Hive, requiring validation or fraud proofs like zk Rollups or optimistic rollups on ethereum. This is the only way to keep the chain sustainable. And no, solutions which do not require consensus are not secure. Might as well just migrate to a pseudo-centralized db at that point. If possible, gut the horrible DPoS and come up with a better consensus mechanism.
Alright, I'm going to stop here. I think I have said enough. Steem & Hive have been an unmitigated disaster, and there is zero evidence to suggest this will not continue to be the case currently. I hope some of the points mentioned here will wake some people up and get them to take action, but that's totally wishful thinking at this time. Nothing short of a complete overhaul from scratch will save Hive and make it a sustainable niche. I wish Hive and its stakeholders the best. I have done my fair share to help you and warn you over the years over the years, I think we can all agree I can do no more. All the best!
Did I mention that Reddit has been beta-testing their tokenization and will soon release widely on ethereum? Oh, yeah, there's that. Why on earth would anyone use a failed platform with 2,000 active users when a long established platform with 400 million active users offers a better experience?
Agree with much of the sentiment but not so much the seemingly prevailing notion of eliminating the reward pool.
That imho would be a crucial error if we were to follow through with it. If we think our community is niche now, get rid of the author reward pool and you will see things quickly devolve.
The fanatical cultish die hards should have no problem but predict the users chasing the figurative dollar on a fishing line will lose interest unless they belong to a niche community with solid economics such as @leofinance.
What I find to be a pity is that Hive was never able to transcend it's own ideological dictates in what is mostly born of anarchist capitalist / libertarian worldviews. Now, don't get me wrong. I love freedom but I am also a strong advocate for order which entails a certain degree of organization or the dirty word *centralization.
I don't have a problem with centralized structures in place working using coordination and the collective capacity of human thought to accomplish greater objectives.
It became apparent to me that these adhoc downvote groups and trails were ineffective and inefficient in disposing of the circlejerks, vote collusion and broad exfiltration of value from the chain. (Not to mention some had their own issues that may have trumped those they tried to police)
Not to toot my own horn too much but I do believe what we had with @steemflagrewards (with @hive-dr) with the broad net we had working against comment spam and the myriad forms of token manipulation on chain could have been so much more.
Perhaps it will
As a hobbyist coder with full plate of existing responsibilities, it will happen in my time but the overarching idea is to not only use the project to mitigate token manipulation on chain but also provide moderation services on platforms off chain using a system of tokenization similar to what we had on Steem.
It seemed the ad hoc groups seemed to think they were able to handle the abuse without a centralized group working as a hivemind of sorts in a decentralized reward structure. I've been accused of being an authoritarian utopian before. Maybe the shoe fits but doesn't change the fact that the thing that proceeded from that vision was proportionally more effective than other moderation entities... Operating at a fraction of the cost.
Now, I don't mean to suggest that moderation is the ONLY issue. There are other vectors of significant value loss that should also be addressed. My opinion, based on some data is the DAO is one of them.
Edit: Sorry noticed some typographic issues and felt the need to clarify so updated
It would never scale. It doesn't solve the problem because the global reward pool is a bad idea. There's literally no unified standard for judging all content except in obvious cases.
It forces these "groups" to play perpetual "whack-a-mole" on the same target. Guess what? You can't stop them from earning curation unless you want to wipe bystanders out.
Tribes (and SMTs supposedly) can allow or disallow the flow of rewards without these pointless bloat that don't go anywhere.
No global reward pool means:
Less pretense "content creators"
Less pretense "curators"
Less pretense "social" bullshit
Maybe more focus on the actual economics
Some people tout the "millions of transactions on Hive" a day, but they are worthless metrics, especially for a group of people we like to dangle "genuine interactions" as a catch phrase or ideal.
the pretentiousness is what killed most of the fun and it shows in the price and people leaving or barely interacting
The Hive doing a new page showing what "level" people are in this idiotic aquatic ecosystem is about the dumbest 'marketing' tool to do what? Negatively reinforce people to invest so their lil' avi isn't a tiny fish? smdh
I agree with that assessment. There are a bunch of people "in charge" that literally don't have expertise in social media and yet they try to "build it".
is why anyone with any real stuff laughs at dpos and is either leaving or powering down their accounts it looks like, the marketing is beyond poor, the people who actually have real life connections and leverage are starved out by this little group of middle aged basement dwellers who just wait for noodz.....over it
Even the nudes here aren't that good. lol
I don't think it necessarily follows but I understand there are significant weaknesses while at the same time it has it's strengths in its topical versatility. Granted it requires curators but things go awry when too much bias enters the process.
That's when we get voting cliques that turn people off as they become disillusioned from the buzzwords that may have brought them here. I personally do not think it's impossible to manage a global reward pool but it requires some degree of judiciousness and organization.
It just seems to be an asset of great potential if we get it operating properly. It's like having a crab bucket but getting rid of it because we can't seem to get rid of the leaks. I just can't seem to get around this idea that removing the RP is like putting your car in a donut.
The issue will still have to be addressed eventually.
Is the concept that these siloed layer 2 communities would be able to reward and moderate their users and minimize selling of the native token? Is that the idea?
And how? Without overwhelming stake? And why do you suppose those with stake are obligated to help you in your crusade? Did it ever occur to you that the person who bought all that stake didn't want to be involved in this complexity? And why do you suppose "mob A" is better than "mob B"?
Obviously yes. Is it easier to stop the leaks because you control the flow of the tokens? Or is it easier to somehow acquire millions and millions of HP to suppress the so called leaks on a decentralized global reward pool?
Not to mention the time and commitment required to operate like a ridiculous "police state".
There's also more incentives to build the value of your token than fighting the overarching market forces when it comes to HIVE.
Do you know how the current tribe tokens work?
When an account is "banished":
What happens on Hive:
Whether or not SMTs would work the same way as imagined is another story.
It's a reasonable argument but regardless the reward pool being present is a huge impetus for engagement, whether genuine or contrived.
Move it to second layer and it won't change that incentive, but enhance it so people aren't just farming at everyone else’s expense.
It would only affect some instead.
I hear you on pretense. That's a by product of ego. More we keep it in check the better.
Personally, there is genuinely good interaction on chain and it would be nice if it were advantageous to reward engagement again on general purpose blogs.
Maybe when hive engine is decentralized things will be better. Hard to say how things are gonna shake rn
NO!
Decentralizing Hive Engine is retarded. Go straight for SMT. Why the hell are we creating TWO consensus layers.
You know they work on atomic swap to help two CHAINS interoperate. Why the hell are we doing this two chain thing to ourselves?
Good point!
I tend to agree with most of this... Top stakeholders are extremely inert and im not not holding my breath for any change.
I did do extremely well for myself with Steem and HIVE though. The price has been tanking all this time but at the same time i 10x my portfolio and im at a point where i comfortably invest 1000+ USD into multiple other things just with what i earned from STEEM and HIVE.
Had i been invested in any other token for that duration of 2-3 years id be at a loss or on equal terms.
So moneywise what you said could be true for large stake holders like you yourself were, but not for all of us.
Sad true story...
I've always done powerups in my small way, but I've been thinking about closing everything for weeks now
!discovery 45
The problem with sunk-cost fallacy is that the longer you keep losing, the more resistant you are to cutting your losses, but then the bigger your losses become. I can see the thought that you have already lost so much that it doesn't matter, but then you can still cut your losses and invest elsewhere. I'd definitely recommend speaking with a financial advisor or someone you trust who is experienced with investing.
I'm not talking about the economic side, I don't really care about that, I'm here, because I liked the platform. But I'm noticing that all the principles on which this blockchain was based are now being forgotten. I've never put money here, but I've invested a lot of time, time that seems wasted right now
I see, I read your comment referring to power ups, so thought you're talking about the money. But yeah, as they say, time is money too...
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I guess.
I'm afraid guesswork isn't going to improve the platform. Only a complete overhaul will.
What's your feedback on the hypothetical removal of the blogging rewards to slow inflation?
I think we'd hemorrhage most of the users initially but if the chain was rebranded and reworked as a utility chain rather than the outside perceiving it as a shitpost for crypto platform it could be something completely different in terms of final outcome of the network.
Initially I was against the whole idea of trashing the blogging rewards.. but the more I think on it the more it seems to be aligned with driving HIVE towards something that looks more feasible long term.
Be interested to hear your thoughts or ideas on this sort of thing. Personally I view it as a double edged sword with short term it having a detrimental effect but long term strengthening the network.. People could still give out shitcoins for blogging like LEO or whatever does.. But as for the main market cap of the chain being used to pay users for which in my opinion in most cases is needless shitposts it'd be nice to phase that out in favour of tribes or whatever.
I have been shouting about it since 2017. Here's one example: https://steemit.com/steem/@liberosist/for-a-better-steem-remove-the-steem-reward-pool-533b951904d14
Unfortunately, that was 2018. It is 2020 now, and it's too late for SMTs. It is 2020 now, and Reddit is in the social media tokenization game, and Twitter is working on a blockchain solution. Not to mention Dan Larimer has billions in the Block one warchest to promote Voice. (Which I also think is destined for failure, but that's another matter...)
I have stated my thoughts clearly in the OP, and multiple times over several years. Tl;dr - cancel the reward pool, drop inflation to lowest possible to retain security, move HBD into maintenance mode, introduce SMTs, build in some functionality to focus on gaming and social media (rather than just custom.json), build zk-rollup-like solutions to build out a secure Layer 2, and most importantly of all, build ethereum and bitcoin interoperability and full EVM compatibility. Do all of this, and I think Hive has a fighting chance of creating its own sustainable niche, assuming there's great marketing.
Guess it's all too late now.
An interesting read over-all, I enjoyed the exchange between you and @kyle, I myself am just a user, not a developer, not an investor, not even really a crypto enthusiast. I did have a few question:
you mentioned critical consensus failure of hive, is this something I need to be concerned with and what failures? Hive had the initial creation Hard Fork from Steem, this did come with a few glitches, but I do not recall any significant failures. Yes HF24 has and did have some issue and that short sidechain split but the glitches are being worked on and the sidefork was taken care of pretty quickly from what I read.
What makes Hive insecure, I use hive in a social manner, I do recall on steem a lot of people accidently giving out their keys, I have seen a few recent post on Hive about phishing and keys being given out to people where they should have known better. Is it the keys part that is insecure or are there ways and means for people to hack and obtain my keys with out me ever giving them out?
When you say people don't use Hive what do you mean? I am just a user, I actually like and enjoy the social side of Hive, there is a fairly large group, (at a guess about 4500), that use Hive in a social type manner. It is the social side that help the developers test and try out their application, a built in beta test group.
I think that once Hive is fully separated out from Steem, and starts to go off in a different direction that things will improve, but it will take time. First HF done, next one to finish the foundation layer. If Hive is to succeed we need to avoid pitfalls and mistakes that were made by steem/steemit. The chasing of the reward pool, the constant changing of the economic layer needs to come to a stop for Hive, it needs to have time to develop, time for investor to see and understand that the economics of Hive are not going to be changed or altered with every hard fork.
Like I said I did enjoy the post, those were just three of the things I really did not understand, but for an alternative to all the centralized social media outlets, I must say I do enjoy the social aspects of Hive.
When facebook first came out I tried it-didn't like it
When Reddit first came out I tried it-didn't like it
Twitter the same.
Google hangouts-the same.
With Steem I liked it, then things went wonky, Hive I still like it, if people can avoid the mistakes of Steem, I will still be around in another year or two.
!ENGAGE 25
I'm not going to go through the technical problems again, I have talked enough about how Hive's tech is very poor, a dinosaur in 2020.
At first I thought you were being sarcastic. 4,500 is basically negligible in a world of 3,000,000,000 social media users. It's a complete failure. "Large group" would be 4.5 million, not 4.5 thousand.
If you like Hive, good for you, but you must accept that you are in a tiny, tiny minority. The platform won't matter at all until at least 4.5 million people use it. 4,500 is laughable. Reddit has 450 million, that's literally 100,000x Hive.
I do hope Hive goes in a new direction, but after 7 months (an eternity in crypto), the progress has been nowhere near enough for me.
I realize it is a small start and we have not reached a tipping point on Hive for growth yet. Reddit/twitter/facebook did not start out overnight with 4.5 million user, it has taken them years to get where they are.
I do understand and see that crypto people see it as nothing more than a get rich quick scheme, that is why so many end up giving their keys and passwords away for phishing expeditions. So 7 months is an eternity for them, the longer it takes the get rich scheme to work the more chance of it being detected. One of the reason every day normal people have a hard time accepting crypto as an investment or a currency.
There are not that many places that developers can go and get real world users to test and play with and suggest product changes enhancement for little to no cost, especially if that developer is new or unknown.
I do hope Hive can break fully away from and leave the memory of steem in the past, that people in one year from now will be singing a different story, but we just have to wait and see. It could all fall apart, but I'll wait, play, and watch what happens.
i understand the tired of explaining thing, still it was all a good read, people should keep their eyes open for opportunity.
ENGAGEtokens.Blurt is looking like the best option at the moment. Good, positive people over there building an awesome community. Https://Blurt.blog