HIVE all time low, just hit 5 cents. I am buying, powering up, but I think the current model is failing.
Sit down. Either read this in one take or sip slowly, one section at a time over a few days. I want to textually punch you in the gut about the reality of the blockchain I am investing in.
HIVE hit 5 cents.
That sentence should hurt.
Coins go up and down. Markets bleed. Crypto is brutal but still price changes are just noise. But an all-time low has a very specific meaning: every person who ever bought HIVE and held that bet is now at a loss.
Everyone.
Every old buyer, every believer, every person who trusted the vision and did not sell higher is underwater. That is what an all-time low means. It is not an opinion. It is the market laughing at every bagholder who believed.
And I am one of them as I keep buying and powering up slowly.
I am not writing this while dumping. I am writing this while doing the financially stupid thing that believers do: buying more of the thing that keeps disappointing them.
So nobody can honestly say this is FUD from a hater.
This is worse. This is a frustrated lover of Hive saying the current model does not work. I love Hive, I have loved it as an author, as a witness, as a dev on some frontends, as an attendee to events... I love Hive and I hope my not only my words but my history on this blockchain proves it.
CoinGecko shows HIVE around 5 cents, down from an all-time high around $3.41. Depending on the tracker and the minute you check, we are around a 27 to 30 million dollar market cap chain now.
That is a tiny hobby-level market cap.
So we need to start thinking like a tiny chain trying to survive, not like a giant protocol cosplaying as a nation.
And the core question is do we want to stay niche or grow? This will be the core inflection decision point of the whole post.
The DHF is not free money
The Hive developer docs say the DHF receives 10% of the annual new supply.
That means every DHF proposal is effectively asking the community:
“Can I create inflation and sell it? Can I dillute your HIVE Power?”
Or more brutally:
“Can I dump this dream into whatever exit liquidity still exists? Can I dump it whuile you buy it from me?”
That is what it comes down to unless the money is coming from real outside income, real customers, real investors, real business revenue, or real VC money that does not dilute HIVE buyers and does not abuse the exit liqudity that surprisingly still exists but dwindles.
The DHF is not revenue. It is not profit. It is not customers paying us. It is Hive printing claims on itself and hoping there is still someone on the market willing to buy them.
The Ecency proposal itself says there is around 23.2M HBD available in the DHF and around 232k HBD possible daily funding. That sounds rich until you ask the ugly question:
Could that HBD actually be sold for 23 million real dollars?
Of course not. The “23M HBD” is a label. Its real value is whatever the market can absorb when funded teams sell HBD to pay rent, salaries, servers and fiat expenses.
At 5 cent HIVE, pretending the DHF is a giant war chest is dangerous. It is a big number inside a small, bleeding economy.
We are one protocol improvement away from bankruptcy
I respect the people keeping Hive alive. A blockchain that stops producing blocks is dead. Witnesses matter. Core development matters. APIs matter. HAF, Hivemind, Denser, node work, security and maintenance matter.
But we already proved Hive can handle far more activity than today.
During the Splinterlands peak, Hive handled millions of daily operations. We had real usage. We had hype. We had a much bigger market cap. Today we are around 50 times smaller than the 2021 peak.
So when the focus stays mostly on protocol improvements, I get angry. Do we still need to keep scaling? Do we want better performance for fewer users?
We are not one more hardfork away from demand.
We are not one more internal API rewrite away from users.
We are not one more elegant technical upgrade away from businesses caring.
We are one protocol improvement away from bankruptcy if the protocol work does not bring users, businesses, income, liquidity or real demand for HIVE and HBD.
The Hive roadmap still talks about mobile nodes, HAF enhancements, API modernization, Denser, lightweight accounts, smart contract prototypes and more. Some of that may be useful. Some of that may be necessary. I personally really want to run a node on my mobile phone.
But does this help Hive stop bleeding?
If the answer is vague then the work may be nice, however nice is too expensive right now.
Most DHF work should be hobby money now
This is the part I personally hate. This is the part teams may refuse to acknowledge because they don't want to or they effectively can not scale down to.
Hive is now at a hobby level of financing. That does not mean Hive is worthless. It means our economic reality is small.
With a few exceptions, if a project cannot be kept alive by a hobbyist in a garage, it probably does not deserve thousands of dollars from the DHF. For many things, a few hundred dollars should already be treated as meaningful support. We don't have a million users.
Recurring six-figure funding on a sub-30M market cap chain is insane.
Unless the project is essential infrastructure or clearly creates more value than it extracts.
And even essential infrastructure should be much smaller than it is today simply because we either scale down preemptively or we scale down because we've ran out of money. Either way we will scale down, that is the nature of current market conditions.
Every serious proposal should answer a few painful questions:
- If this gets funded, who is likely to sell the HBD?
- How much market pressure does that create?
- What outside income will replace DHF funding?
- What gets cut if HIVE goes another 50% down?
- Does Hive die without this, or do some people just lose a paid position?
- Is this a business or a community hobby?
That last question matters.
If it is a small community hobby, fine. Keep it cheap. Run it lean. Ask for hobby money.
If it is a serious business asking for 100k+ USD per year, then act like a business. Have revenue. Have customers. Have paid features. Have ads. Have a path to independence.
Do not ask holders to fund a business while refusing to make business decisions. You are asking us to fund your egoistic and ideological delusions. You are not above the morals you think you have. Make money.
Frontends need to drop the ego and the ideology
A frontend with no business model is not a business.
It is constant dump pressure.
It is dilution of our value through inflation.
I like our frontends. I use them. I voted for some of them. I supported proposals I still believe are too big, because I use the products and I see their value.
Keychain’s 2026 proposal asks for 540 HBD per day. They talk about reducing DHF dependency, swaps, EVM, partnerships, revenue and making this their last DHF proposal. Good. I support that direction and approved it, with my vote they are closer to reaching their requested funding. But 540 HBD per day is still a lot of money for a chain at this level. If that funding gets sold into the market, it hurts. I am afraid it hurts us more than the value it creates
Ecency’s proposal asks for 396 HBD per day. They list dev costs, servers, onboarding and infrastructure. I use Ecency. I support Ecency. I voted for it and it too is closer to funding because of my vote and my support. I also think that ask is huge and unreasonable for the sad economic reality we are in. I am also afraid it may hurt us more thant he value it creates.
This is the contradiction. I approve things because I use them and I want to believe they have value, while knowing that the funding itself may be shooting myself in the foot.
That is the cult follower part of me. That is the cult side of all of Hive, we behave sometimes almost like a religion.
The rational part says: if a frontend believes it is worth six figures (6 figures!!!) a year, it needs revenue. Ads. Premium accounts. Paid tools. Promoted posts. AI credits. Business accounts. Analytics. Subscriptions. Anything.
If the ideology is “no ads, no paid features, no business model,” then pay the team and infrastructure out of your own pocket. That ideology is expensive. Do not charge all holders for it.
Onboarding is still embarrassing
At Hive Open Days in Alicante, we spent almost 10 minutes helping one person create an account.
She already knew crypto. She was surrounded by experienced Hive users. Even then, the process was confusing. Frontends, Keychain, account creation, keys, flows, options, explanations. It was a mess. She almost gave up.
That is my empirical proof that all our “onboarding improvements” still failed at the most basic test.
Can a normal interested person create an account quickly, on their mobile phone, while standing next to people who know Hive?
In that case, barely. That person was very interested in Hive, 9 out of 10 people would have given up then and there.
And that was a friendly environment.
Now imagine a random user alone at home.
I will commit a blockchain sin, I will say a crypto heresy:
Want to make onboarding easy? Allow the user to create an account just with an e-mail and a password. Hold and manage their keys for them. Yes, it is unsafe, yes no one wants to do it because of the risks, but that is the functional difference between life and death of future onbaording attemps.
Also, frontends, stop worshiping raw activity numbers. A lot of on-chain activity is automation. Curation trails, copy voting, bots, scripts, farming, spam, “positive” automation and malicious automation. Do you think you are better than professional abusers? Think you can tell real organic from bot data? I am sure most of the "current traffic" after "discounting bots and spam" is still bots and spam, just fancier and uncaught.
Hivewatchers recently found abuse around free account creation. It is easy to onboard bots. It is still hard to onboard real humans.
So when proposals talk about users, accounts, views and activity, the numbers need to separate real people from automation as much as possible.
Otherwise we are funding dashboards that make us feel alive while the market keeps saying we are dying.
We don't want the dead internet theory to be synonymous with Hive. Make onboarding easier for humans and harder for bots. Do we need a phone 2FA to prevent bots? Probably. Would that hurt user anonimity? 100% would. How many users care about that? I do not know. Again we are at the crossroads between ideology and common sense.
HBD is not magic either
Hive’s own HBD page says HBD savings is currently 15% APR, voted by witnesses. It also says the haircut rule activates when the HBD debt ratio is greater than or equal to 30%, stops printing HBD and breaks the $1 peg.
The haircut rule may be good design. It may be much safer than Terra. I am not saying HBD is UST.
But people need to stop acting like the economy cannot break.
A controlled depeg is still a depeg. A safety mechanism still means someone gets hurt. If HIVE keeps falling, the system gets more fragile.
At the moment, public trackers have shown HBD trading far below $1 depending on liquidity and venue. Maybe arbitrage fixes it. Maybe it is temporary. Maybe it is thin markets.
But from outside, the story looks awful: HIVE at all-time lows, HBD under pressure, DHF still funding teams, and everyone explaining why this is fine.
It does not look fine.
The decision
If Hive wants to be a niche community, that is okay.
Really.
We can be a small club of friends. We can post, vote, meet, run witnesses, keep the chain alive, and pay for most things ourselves. There is dignity in that.
But then stop pretending we are building for a billion-dollar market cap and a million users.
A niche community cannot afford endless six-figure DHF funding. Witness rewards will shrink. Only witnesses with real income outside Hive will keep running things. Frontends will need to become cheap community projects. Most things will need to be run by hobbyists because they love Hive.
That is one path.
The other path is to admit we want growth and act accordingly.
That means businesses. Ads. Paid features. Better onboarding. Real products. External income. Revenue. Hard cuts. Smaller proposals. Clear metrics. Less ideology. Less marble tower. Less pretending that we are above economics.
Some important people on Hive talk from the top of a withering marble tower like our economy is immune to collapse. Like we are better than every failed crypto experiment because our intentions are cleaner.
We are not immune.
The chart says so.
The price says so.
The all-time low says so.
Every person who bought and held HIVE is now the punchline of a sad joke unless we change the ending.
I am still buying. I am still powering up. I am still here.
But I do not want to keep buying into a dream that refuses to wake up.
Hive at 5 cents should be treated as an emergency meeting.
Witnesses, whales, DHF-funded teams and frontends should put one question on the table:
Do we want to be a small hobby community, or do we want to be a serious economy?
Both answers are valid.
The current answer is the only one that makes no sense: hobby-level market cap, six-figure expectations, no business model, inflation-funded comfort, and another protocol improvement on the way down.
That cannot continue.
Great post! Your post has been curated from Ecency.
At this level some emergency plan should have kicked in: IMMEDIATE STOP of any DHF funding and reduction of the HBD interest from 12% to 5% and reduction of the HP inflation from 4% to maybe 2%. Just until price recovers to >6c.
Were the top witnesses like @blocktrades and co. never foreseeing such a scenario? How unprofessional one can be? Every shit company has mitigation plans for SHTF-scenarios.
I would (apart from not supporting proposals) also NOT VOTE for any witness who is still POWERING DOWN and draining Hive like there is no tomorrow.
When things were going well it was easy to dismiss criticism as FUD, when things were going down it was easy to deny. When it is not falling anymore, because it became worthless, is when it will really hurt holders. The teams though will move on and find other projects to live off of.
And HBD recovers its peg.
Reality is soon catching up. They (all teams and individuals living off of inflation) need an emergency plan and at least to immediately publicly acknowledge it is a dire situation before they share their emergency plan.
I have lost count how many all time lows we have seen this year, I started buying again precisely to support Hive as it is reaching lower all time lows on a monthly basis. HBD is depegged by a huge margin. What are we doing? Asking for another 6 figures and making the blockchain even faster and more scalable?
Plus I'd consider not voting for witnesses that are supporting outrageous projects as if the DHF is real money. We do not have liqudity to finance so many 100k+ a year projects simultenously.
That's one aspect that I meant when I posted that Hive needs to "de-Ponzify"(term I coined to describe a business model that require constant recruitment of new members and resources being poured in without returns just to keep in relative stability).
For that reason Hive must be used for real services instead of just circulating internally. The protocol already has several implementations that could allow Hive to actually operate like, for example, a real bank.
Another example of real world application:
In struggling economies(like Venezuela and some African countries) HBD is being used as actual stable currency the same way PIX is used in Brazil.
I do not think that more DeFi is exactly what we need right now but I get your point
I do believe we should use the bearing market to accumulate more Hive Power in order to get more voting power so we can influence who is and is not in the security council, which is how I call the top 20 witnesses.
I don't have grudge with most witnesses there but it would be nice to have a shake up in our council of overlords.
I'm on the blockchain every day... but I just don't see how the future of Hive survives. I can't say what problem that actually matters to a lot of people is being fixed by this blockchain, so unfortunately I don't think it's much more than a hobby.
I am absolutely fine with Hive being a hobby, I will stay here even if I have to restart my witness node (I am sure there will be a witness exodus if HIVE/HBD becomes worthless) and keep interacting and participating in events.
But that is to be the road we gown down to we need to pretend we can finance projects that want to have six figures like a business but don't want to be self sufficient like a business NOW. That goes for witnesses and funded projects.
Edit: As for the problem, none, I can't also think of one. The fact that our feeds are boring was never solved and that is something that the devs could tackle that brings more value than yet another scalability improvements. The chronological timeline type of feed is not attractive to most users. Some may value but because it is so hard for frontends to customize the feeds (snaps and eaves tried to do it with comments) makes we lose appeal as a social network
I have always thought that we have great potential in niche communities. I had high expectations for community breaks, but it truly disappointed me. Now with AI, we have the opportunity to create social networks for each community. Selling niche applications to administrators of large communities can be highly attractive. This is a new level of digital ownership and business model. Furthermore, with how cheap it is to store data on Hive, it is also one of our greatest advantages.
I made a niche app, and we are testing it before launching it. I am teaching my high school students to build them within the niches they are passionate about. I hope to scale this over the coming months.
I have always said that communities should be viewed as a business, complete with their own onboarding strategy and business model, but in my 9 years here, I have seen very few people with that vision. They only see income coming from the DHF or the reward pool.
Definitely agree about Hive’s niche community potential, but the model has to be an actual business model.
We in SkateHive have been building what’s essentially a shared magazine by skaters, for skaters, and I’m trying to convince them to start selling advertising. Of course the key we believe would be to have our own second layer token, which can keep the revenue shared within our own community. Skateboard ads won’t be enough to move the Hive price much, but it should be enough to keep a magazine running. So either everyone does that, and that slowly trickles back into Hive, or we create the model on Hive, and encourage communities to replicate it as well.
I'm glad to read this. I love the magazine idea; not so much the second-layer token one. I think you should explore the possibility of building your own DApp (with AI it's easy), that way you'll have more freedom to create features that attract your specific niche, and some of those features could even be premium with a subscription. When people are invited to a community that shares their exact interests, they are more open to it and stay longer. We discovered this with Hive Run.
Un crudo análisis,
Como bien dices, cuando una blockchain toca un mínimo histórico, ya no estamos ante simple ruido de mercado, o volatilidad común; estamos ante una señal de alarma que afecta el bolsillo de absolutamente todos los que han creído y mantenido su apuesta aquí. Seguir operando bajo la mentalidad de cuando HIVE valía 3 dólares es una desconexión peligrosa con nuestra realidad económica actual. Algo desalentador, para los que entramos hace poco con una ilusión.
I think you hit the nail on "only those with real income OUTSIDE hive" can sustain.
Because of the current situation and a lot are literally having trouble obtaining income outside HIVE is the pivot that will bankrupt it.
I am trying to help by encouraging people to spend their HBD with my new ebook launch. However I can, of course i am not a millionaire myself.
If there are any entrepreneur could to do the same maybe there will be less bleeding outword
A decade ago, TeamMalaysia tried to do that. But with such a tiny community trying to do while others dunping at all time high but not buying at all time low, that happens
is awful see hive drop down a lot :(
IF we want to see broader adoption the power has to spread out.
Nobody buys in when the price to power ratio is out of whack.
What that price is, I don't know, but we have to be getting close to it.
What do you mean by power spreading out? Do you mean HP and the centralization we have on some large holders?
What would the "price to power ratio" mean? Trying to understand your point
When you buy hive, the governance power you receive would need to be on par with the price you pay, for the purchase to make sense outside price speculation.
To be somebody in the hive one needs in excess of 30m hive power.
The price of this 30m hive is currently 1.5m usd.
This is the price to power ratio.
At this moment, even at the all time low, that price is too high.
It has been too high all along, but many folks are slow to do the math.
Investors have long avoided hive because of this reality, imo.
Who buys in only to be diluted by folks that got their hive for much less than is currently possible?
In amounts that make playing on par with them nearly impossible.
The top 20 curation accounts, and their favored authors, currently take 50% of the daily rewards pool.
Most of the author rewards are getting dumped as quick as they get it, I'm told.
IF you are not one of them, you get diluted.
The value of your hive goes down in relation to those getting it, and selling it, for less than what you paid.
This concentration of power has long been given as the reason many folks leave.
Nobody wants to play in the rigged game.
Somebody is supporting the price, it has not been allowed to drop to the distribution point.
Maybe this is a good thing, but it certainly further concentrates power in an already too concentrated game.
This has been the game all along, until it changes, or some new app explodes, there is no reason for outsiders to join the hive.
Normies and the unsuspecting will continue to trickle in, and out, but no investors buy in under these circumstances.
Those top 20 curators will ride hive to zero, it appears.
The math doesn't support investment in the hive under these conditions.
Oh, I get it, I agree.
That would be contradictory with DPoS though, that would be PoS. Because we are DPoS the power is also in the connectiong and contacts you have and many whales ABSUSE IT by circle voting and circle financing themselves. I am still not against DPoS but I am on the borderline of calling our whales corrupt.
They are DOING WHAT WE FEARED JUSTIN SOO WOULD DO when we forked.
That is the lie we bought into didn't we?
We were told that big holders have in their best interest to make the coin more valuable because if they do nto then their stake devalues.
We didn't take into account that they would simply not play by those rules and just keep farming and actually ride down to zero and take away as much as they can from the ecosystem until it completetly collapses.
I am very stupid for buying but I buy little enough so that it is just a fun bet, not an investment by far. Going to a casino probably would give me better odds.
As you said, not even buying for the power and influence is worth it because you said it right, I buy and power up 6k HP for the Hive Power Up Day, the whales dillute me so that those same 6K HP one year later mean nothing.
Greedy folks gonna greed.™
I think the order went out to ned that
steemneeded to be run aground.When the two year development walkabout and bidbots didn't do it, he sold us down the river to the chicoms.
But, that didn't kill the ideas.
I can only speculate of folks' motives, but greed, power, and control seem to be top of the list with too many playing this game with game breaking amounts of, largely, ninjamine era stake.
Maybe they want us to fail, too?
They have certainly been given enough guff from the crowd.
It's not like the men in black will show up to our doors asking why we wrote code that broke the banks.
No.
The only way over this hill is buying more hive.
You may have paid 'too much', but distributing power is a way to save the platform.
As long as we have witness nodes running, or get them running again in the future, the game will go on, for better or worse.
I don't see any price appreciation, barring an app changing things, until the current management has sold to new management.
Too much water under the bridge with the current administration, or lack thereof.
That means that power is on sale, now is the time to cost average in.
IF we have to restart the witnesses from scratch, I'd expect some changes to occur along the lines that started hive, and for the same reasons.
I agree with your points but not with that solution:
At least I am not sure. Maybe the opposite is the case: The only way to get rid of the early miner farmers might be when the price goes to nearly zero, so that even extensive farming is not worth in anymore, so that they finally leave (sell their HIVE) and make the way free for a completely new beginning?
The problem with buying more HIVE is that if you want to buy enough to be able to compete with the early miners you will increase the price, make them even richer and finally struggle to buy more HIVE so that in the end the well-known game begins again...
Yep, 'paid too much' is the risk of clearing this logjam.
I bought higher, too.
You said a lot here, @igormuba, I'm going to respond as I think up points...
Let's start with market fundamentals for virtually anything: When demand is higher than supply, prices rise. When supply is greater than demand, prices fall. What is the compelling reason to buy and hold Hive? 15-second "elevator speech" version.
You've got 15 seconds. Go!
Let's just say we're pitching this to your average blogger/vlogger, or "refugee" who's sick and tired of the vacuousness of FB/Insta/TikTok and wants a venue with more "meat on its bones."
It doesn't matter how much people keep polishing the code, building scaling and various technical aspects of Hive. The analogy I have been using for years is that it doesn't matter that you've build the world's greatest sports car... if you're living in a remote village with no paved roads and nobody knows about you.
I'm approaching my 10th year here, but also approaching my 10th year of pointing out that we simply cannot afford to just be "Decentralized Crypto Blockchainiacs" as if that's the magic unicorn dust that makes a success. Nobody cares. "Decentralization" remains meaningless to 90-95% of the population. "Censorship resistant" might carry slightly more depth.
Thinking about, that situation from Alicante you describe... I have repeatedly suggested "Light" accounts as a way to reduce the barriers to entry here. Your basic "sign up with Google/Facebook" that gives you access to everything except financial features. You start with a 25HP "loan" (to minimize RC issues) which can be a delegation from a DHF sponsored account that goes away when the acount actually reaches 25HP. You can even watch your rewards build in your account... but you can't touch it until you get your actual keys, which requires you to commit to a full account. Light accounts come with the additional proviso that if a "light" account goes dormant for more than 6 or 12 or 24 months (whatever) whatever Hive is there is automatically burned. Not only would it facilitate entry; these signups could serve as somewhat of an inflation reducer.
As for the DHF... great idea, but I believe it should be contingent on several things, including "no business plan showing revenue, no funding" and an additional requirement that that some part of the funding (10%? 20%?) MUST be used for external marketing of the final product. In other words... time to emphasize projects that offer utility to people outside the walls of Hive.
Along with that, don't forget that you're basically asking for a "grant." Do you have ANY idea of how much detail and documentation goes into a conventional grant proposal? And how much reporting is required to account for where and how the funding is being used? Grants aren't just a magic cash dispenser!
Lastly, we also need to let go of (at least in part) this myopic thinking that somehow "Hive's built in user base" is all that's needed for a DHF funded project to become successful. Sorry... WRONG. Go pitch your show outside Hive and see if anyone cares. If they don't, maybe you shouldn't be asking for money.
And yes, I am well aware that maintaining basic infrastructure matters. Could be the DHF needs to be segmented into discrete allocations for different types of projects.
Final thought about the "Ponzi" question. Hive isn't really a Ponzi, in much the same way as some of the Network Marketing programs I was familiar with 30-40 years ago weren't Ponzis. The problem tended to be an overemphasis on selling the program rather than selling the products. We need to start pitching the tangible benefits of Hive, not just Hive the concept. People invest in stuff they can USE, not just cool ideas.
To deponzify our economy we need to stop thinking about what people would invest in and start to think what would people pay for
It cannot continue... but unfortunately what it feels like is that the ones with power to stop it don't really seem that interested in doing so. We keep seeing huge DHF payouts, we even opened the doors to rectroactive payments... no one in their right mind would invest in Hive nowadays. Like you, I spend a lot of time here, still enjoy playing games daily, but it's painful to see what we are becoming. And yes, we can be just a little community, but for how long? Right now, I would say: burn the DHF in its entirety, or almost all of it.
Thanks for another wake up call, they're in dire need. Cheers!
Are making enough money to pretend it is not a problem and pretend they are morally superior.
That exact proposal made me lose a bit of faith in Hive, look at how many top 20 witnesses supported that despite widespread community criticism
https://peakd.com/me/proposals/368
Some people are becoming what we thought Justin Sun would be for Steem.
We don't need to burn the DHF, it is useful for financing in terms of high liquidity and strong bull markets. The thing is, we may not live to see another bull market.
I don't know if you noticed how much the DHF is changing. It is shrinking significantly. Valueplan has only made one proposal this year, and it wasn't fully approved. It was only 80K, whereas by this time last year, they were already close to 500K.
There are 3 large (new) continuation proposals that have gone a month without being approved, and another proposal that has been running for a year and has another one to go, which is currently unfunded. Furthermore, there are very few days left before other major proposals come to an end, and it seems they won't be funded again either.
Great post on your views on what is going wrong. totally agree with your sentiments. I have learnt a lot over the last year and no longer support or vote for any proposal,(apart from worldmappin, which are very transparent) the killer for me was some individual wanting support to buy a fucking computer.
I do see a lot of posts about this little app that little app, mostly about checking stats, personal and of others, but seriously, what benefit is that for the Hive? What value does it bring? What does it cost!
I think I know exactly what little app about checking stats you refer to LOL
The little projects are clearly AI made and add little to no value, but hey, if Hive users want to experiment, play, and create useless stuff WITHOUT the DHF funds go for it, let them have fun and engage (although some of them need a reality shock based on how they right), they are not asking for anything in return, at least not yet...
Que calidad de contenido @igormuba! Me gustó mucho lo que compartiste. Vote y comento para dar visibilidad. Seguí así!
I will remove my votes on all DHF projects.
I am not investing more money into HIVE though.
It is time to have some major changes on this chain.
Maybe keep voting on the return proposal, this raises the bar. The problem remains though that we have no power, it would require a hardfork-level of coordination to defund 6 figure projects and to rotate the top 20 witnesses list.
This was a hell of a read.. some real home truths being told, all the dirty laundry on display, big time!!
I'm a relative newbie in the HIVE ecosystem, only really landed at the tail end of 2025 and have been using my Account as a new user experiment of sorts, focused on Blogging, Actifit, Splinterlands.. purposefully kept queries to a minimum, really wanted to see how easy the ecosystem was to navigate on my own two feet.
Its been a wild ride, coming from a Software Developer background I can really see and mostly understand what the ecosystem is trying to achieve, there are lots of things I like about HIVE but fully agree with some of your assessment.
All that being said I wish to end with positivity, I've run into many lovely people in this ecosystem, friendly, helpful, Actifit has actually had a positive impact on my health, and Splinterlands is great fun to play. I'm hoping to create a new Community on here soon and then push to start onboarding friends and wider circle now that I understand the onboarding mechanism requirements :)
The first bullet point is key. A tiny minority of users care about their private keys, matter of fact worse than that, most people store their keys unsecurely, they are better off having a trusted admin handling their keys securely for them. There is no argument, beyond the moral high ground some teams think they have, to not have a centralized key manager (boo, the ghost of centralization 👻)
Yet another user guide reminds me of this XKCD about standards:
https://xkcd.com/927/
Maybe we don't just need a new guide but we also need to NUKE and remove old ones so they don't confuse new people.
The search engine is probably difficult because Hive has awful search operations, it is the reason we can't have an algorithmic feed. The architectural decisions are showing its age.
I've seen AI do incredible things
In general I support AI aided development but we need to thread carefully not to shoot ourselves in the foot with code and feature quality. AI doesn't scale that well over long periods of time, it can start and produce stuff 800% faster but eventually, because of technical debt and feature creep, it drops to 20% and some researches even show it can SLOW DOWN DEVELOPMENT (if used properly caring for quality)
Well said :)
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Vps again. It happens.
urielkinnear, you mined 0.9 🟧 HBIT and the user you replied to (igormuba) received 0.1 HBIT on your behalf as a tip. When you mine HBIT, you're also playing the Wusang: Isle of Blaq game. 🏴☠️
Sorry, but you didn't find a bonus treasure token today. Try again tomorrow...they're out there! Your random number was 0.4928800177581941, also viewable in the Discord server, #hbit-wusang-log channel. | tools | wallet | discord | community | daily <>< Check for bonus treasure tokens by entering your username at a block explorer A, explorer B, or take a look at your wallet.There is a treasure chest of bitcoin sats hidden in Wusang: Isle of Blaq. Happy treasure hunting! 😃 Read about Hivebits (HBIT) or read the story of Wusang: Isle of Blaq.
$PIZZA slices delivered:
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Please vote for pizza.witness!
Good points! The DHF has wasted quite a lot of funds over the past years I think. And although the projects have lowered their demands, it still is a lot of money. Especially when you see the the small active user base Hive has.
I don't know if making onboarding is the solution either. I've been following a lot of newcomers lately. The vast majority are from countries where there is a large financial incentive to join Hive. Yes, they often are very active and it is is good to have more activity on Hive, but I also see a lot of rewards being withdrawn. Which is understandable when you live in poor conditions, but having more Hive being sold on the exchanges is also negatively influencing the price I think.
I think we should have more people powering up their Hive instead of extracting it.
Together with lowering the rewards for the DHF projects, it might help the price of hive to recover a bit....
And we need to find ways to onboard more people that don't extract their rewards.
Recently I've created a Hive Account Health Dashboard I'm using to see if people are extracting a lot. I'm using it when I'm curating to make sure the accounts that extract a lot don't get rewards from me. It's not much, but it's something I can do.
If someone cares about what the authors do with their rewards we can, at dire times, individually start supporting authors that buy and power up and not authors who power down or even go as far as not supporting authors that do power up but do not even buy. Buying at this moment shows their commitment and many authors, witnesses and projects are not committed, at least not enough to put their own made-out-of-hive money on the line
KE value is perfect for this. The highet above 1, the more rewards have been extracted. Below 1 is more staked Hive than rewards earned.
I don't mind if someone has a KE that is slightly above 1, but a lot more means no upvote.
That is genius! Make a ranking out of that! Or is there one already?
PS: does it take into account staking from outside of HIVE? I feel like beneficiaries of the DHF will have a lower coefficient because they get paid by the inflation, versus people who ACTUALLY BUY HIVE
Thanks! A ranking is difficult since people have their own ideas about these figures.
That's why I encourage everyone to use the tool and draw their own conclusions.
When you have added and powered extra Hive, you can have a KE lower than 1. I have used Hive to buy HBD and to play some games which increased the amount of Hive, which I then powered up again.
Apart from a starting amount I have never bought Hive with fiat.
But I do keep building on Hive.
Ok so the KE is not exactly useful, it is bound to track contribution to inflation but not to cash flow. I just saw lordbuttlerfly's score, he lives off of Hive so he earns HIVE and spend it, his score is similar to mine and I have been buying and powering up. Makes sense that it is not a useful metric by itself because it can be misleading about cash flow
That's why I created a dashboard with multiple stats.
You can also see the putgoin trasfers of the last 30 days.
It is something...
Spot on - we are a tiny niche and our problems should be clear - but as community we just can not move forward - for that we need a more corporate structure.
I agree with much of your diagnosis, but I think the discussion is still missing the elephant in the room.
Again and again we talk about DHF funding, inflation, onboarding, frontends and governance.
Those are important topics.
But after years of discussing them, Hive is still largely talking to itself.
The real question is not whether Ecency should get X HBD or Keychain should get Y HBD.
The real question is: who is driving adoption?
Who is building partnerships?
Who is bringing businesses onto Hive?
Who is marketing Hive outside the existing community?
Who is accountable for growth?
As someone who works in enterprise sales, I see many communities making the same mistake: they confuse decentralization with the absence of leadership.
A decentralized ecosystem can still have people driving strategy, marketing, partnerships and execution.
Personally, I would even support a community vote to fund a small professional business development and marketing organization if clear KPIs and accountability existed.
Because if we truly believe Hive is faster, safer, more resilient and more useful than many competing chains, then the biggest failure is not technology.
The biggest failure is that hardly anyone outside our community knows or cares.
At some point we need to decide whether Hive wants to be a passionate hobby community or a serious ecosystem competing for users, businesses, developers and capital.
The market has already given us its opinion.
Now we need to decide what to do with that feedback.
We can grow all we want. Our economic model is probably broken and we will be back at this stage eventually.
I agree with the business side, the marketing side I think we have tried and failed at too many times to be worth spending even more at.
marketing spendings might have been not correct allocated - just saying "car"
Car, movie... We were spending like we were a company with real income. And those people are still around, still looking for more funds...
Exactly - most spendings are non sense but people lioke to be paid so will not change it seems
Love everything you said. It’s clear, honest and puts the decision to make on the table:
Do we want to stay niche or grow?
I'll be here ten years in July and we've been saying for the better part of a decade that onboarding should be easier. I really do believe that one simple thing were easier then more people would try Hive—we'd have more liquidity, the market cap would grow, it would solve a lot of issues. Onboarding should be as simple as snapping a QR code, as few steps as possible. I've never seen engagement and sentiment this low as long as I've been here and I'm concerned. First principals thinking should be applied to revamp as much as we can in regards to the UI. This isn't a problem that can't be fixed.
Funny, when I say this I'm the bad guy.
You know how a community that actually strategizes about what they fund would approach this?
If you are funding 3 things for 3000 thousand dollars and you want them to generate revenue, asset demand, whatever.... You cut 2 that dont and keep the one that does. Now youre not spending 3000 dollars, youre spending 1000.
So in this context spending 540 HBD is not a lot at all, if theres a new strategy set and you cut those that dont follow that strategy. You are actually spending only a part of the money you spent before and getting what you want out of it.
Problem is that many people think all proposals are made the same, judged on popularity. If they were the same, Keychain would not be changing its approach. They are not the same.
3 things:
If it means you dont sleep, then you dont sleep. If you cant look at the screen anymore and your AI isnt working through the night then you are missing out on work that could be done.
If thats what it takes then thats what it takes. And it will take that from many of us, for us to change our trajectory.
Our community can hardly agree on a strategy.
You have got the short end of the straw. Everyone making proposals are bad guys under current market conditions, no way around it regardless of how benefitial their projects are.
Even useful projects and contributors can hurt HIVE if they need to sell HBD into a dying market to survive, we are a dying blockchain. It is highly unlikely that we are just "one good proposal away from changing things", and that applies to any and every proposal right now.
As individuals, people will also look at the bottom line: over the past year, how much money made outside Hive did you use to buy HIVE versus how much Hive-funded money did you use as income? Or even to pay for operational costs if any.
I do not know your answer. I am not accusing you. But if people think Hive is your job, and if they think DHF funding becomes your living expenses, or even necessary operational expenses then at 5 cent HIVE it leaves a bad taste. Fair or not, that is the reality.
That is as valid for you as it is valid for PeakD, for Ecency, for Keychain, their temas for everyone getting a piece of the inflation or the DHF, we are going down and projects are adding to the sell pressure REGARDLESS IF THEY ARE ESSENTIAL OR BENEFITIAL. People will not vocalize, but they will look how much you bought versus how much you made.
That is why I opened my post saying I am buying HIVE with money made outside Hive. I was also afraid of being seen as the bad guy. The only shield I had was showing that my flow is from outside work into Hive, not from Hive into my life.
If you post the same argument but show data proving you bought more HIVE than you earned from Hive, people will look at you differently. Completely differently. And you even have more visibility and credibility than me as I know you are more popular, more influential, more well known, have better contacts, more influence and reputation etc...
During the bull markets or when liquidity was healthy this was not even worth discussing (and that was our mistake), but as we break all time low after all time lows how much you bought versus how much you made change people's view, it is the difference between being seen as the bad guy or a contributor. And you made quite a bit on previous proposals. If people they do not know they assume. No one will dig your chain history or try to give you the benefit of the doubt. We gotta earn it time and again. I felt I had to open preving my value by saying I am buying with outside money into Hive and I think that is why I was (at least not yet and not apparently) seen as the bad guy. I am a small user buying and powering up, exactly what people want right now.
Under current market conditions people are craving to cut all and fund none. If HIVE keeps going down and HBD keeps worsening its depeg that is direction we will go anyways we want it or not, no one will get funded because we will be broke. I am even considering unsupporting the proposals I supported and voting only the return proposal to raise the bar.
We are already going towards bankruptcy. Bankrupt projects don't have funds for a single proposal. Better to cut willingly than to cut because we've run out of liquidity completely.
It is a lot because HBD is not magic money. I'd dare say it is not even money. Asking for 540HBD means, at the bottomline, asking to sell 540 HBD worth of HIVE.
I agree with you. A proposal with a revenue plan is not the same as one with no revenue plan.
Under current market conditions, and I keep emphasizing it because this is vastly different from a bull market with enough liqudity to fund projects, nder current market conditions they all share one ugly common denominator: they add sell pressure period. Does not matter if they promise to generate demand or positive cashflow now, tomorrow, or 1 year later, what matters is sell pressure now.
Under current condition all proposals sum down to how much they will add in sell pressure. We can not afford 100k+ to have income 1 year later, even 1 week later, the situation is dire now. The proposal must have income now, it must have a business model that bring mony from outside of Hive into Hive and be net positive at that before proposing anything, to the point the DHF is contradictorily needless.
And inside a panic budget, even good projects become painful.
Paradoxically the only good proposals are the ones where the team has no reason to use the DHF because right now they are bringing value to Hive. We are in a dire situation and going bankrupt soon. Anything that involves spending is delusional right now and people will look down to. Well, not the big holders and whales, they will keep funding each other, but the masses of smaller contributors, the ones who do buy HIVE, they will not like it.
So it is.
There is nothing to prove. Hive is my job. Its the primary thing I do. Talking about skin in the game, I have no skin outside this game. Thats primarily why I cant let Hive continue in the direction it has been going in, because it affects me more than almost anyone else on this chain.
Then there is no point in discussing strategy at all. There is no strategy, spend when you have it, stop when you dont.
Why talk about it if it doesnt matter.
You missed the point of the comment. The whole comment explains why Im saying what im saying.
So when does strategy start to matter? When we have money it doesnt matter. When we dont have money it doesnt matter.
Does it matter ever? When things are going well nobody cares to think about this stuff and never will.
So we have to make the shift now, when people actually start to care, there is no other point in time when it can be done.
Thats the no-strategy approach. Its all the same, lump it all together. Doing open source stuff is the same as keychain spending on building towards revenue generation that brings money potentially into the system. "Its all the same, its just numbers."
How productive can the money being spent be? Thats the question.
1 HBD to one project does not EVER equal 1 HBD to another.
I think you fail to understand what I mean when I say we are (almost) bankrupt.
And I understand why.
Yeah, that's the difference between me and those who think Hive should be a hobby chain. I take this stuff very seriously.
As far as I know most proposals have been defunded.
However, funding same old front-ends still baffles me.
Just to prove that point, I built the whole front-end again - for free of cost - except claude code.
Of course, I also love hive & I keep buying hive whenever I get chance, I keep building but yes it's just sad to see this happening to Hive.
New People on hive are publicly-shamed for circle voting. All they are trying to do is support each other because they never get supported for posting the content apart from introduction post. That's not the real damage - but whales & witnesses keep pointing this as bad.
But what most witnesses do is - circle witness vote each other. They circle-DHF vote each other. And things like builingwhales self-voting, even more taking & keeping it to themselves. is this bad or not?
I approved some proposals because I use the products, I onboarded people and I think they are useful, but funding ANYTHING right now baffles me. I am considering removing my support and approvin the return proposal to do my little part to help defund even more projects. Note, it is not because I approved their proposals that I support them blindly, Ecency for instance is asking too much for current market conditions and I strongly dislike that.
The big problem is that big frontends are guilty of their own influence and power. They have the contacts and the support to get funded by a few big enough whales even if people think they are asking too much.
I get your point, what the big frontends are doing could be done with much less than the 6 figures they ask. If they want 100k+ they must figure out their own revenue strategies.
Totally agree with you that that is a much bigger problem that small fish circle voting each other. Recent proposals have had huge backlashes, like the girl asking to be reimbursed for expenses of past years, and they still finance that kind of stuff. They do not care what people think.
That is the fallacy of DPoS we believed. We thought that whales would have an incentive to look for the best interest of everyone, because if people lose trust their own stake is devalued. What happens in practice on Hive is that the big whales seem to not care about the worries and needs of the small people, at least not enough, as long as they can keep funding themselves.
It actually reminds me, didn't we fork off of Steem because we were afraid Justin Sun would do exactly that?
Unfortunately, I agree with everything you said... Personally, for the last few years, I remember asking multiple times the same question over and over again, all projects that would ask for DHF funding in their "presentation" events... In Discord, on chain, or anywhere else... the question was: "When will your project be self-sustainable?"...
I did get an answer many times, which was always the same "We are working on it...", but on the other side, I never saw anyone laying out the HOW TO be self-sustainable in any of their proposals...
Sorry, but the answer "SOON" isn't convincing anymore... We heard it too many times...
That's just hypocrisy... I want to be a vegan, but you will eat vegetables for me... 😃
To finish on a positive note... HIVE isn't broken... Chain works... Token economy is broken, incentives are broken... As you said...
Thanks for the post! Appreciate you sharing your opinion! 🙏
I bet they even looked down at you like "look at this person, going against our sacred morals, little does he know we will always have liqudity and funding"
I am gonna also share a positive note, although it may not sound like it for people that are here for profit.
It is still a social network. If it all goes down I will still look forward to meeting you at our next event, when we are worth 0.0001 cents but still have our communities and can still meet and chat.
The thesis behind Hive was that the communities have financial value, I think time has proven that is not enough so yeah, financially we are walking towards ruin. I just hope that the communities survive and we keep the events to meet and a few forums to chat with each other.
If we do go bankrupt at least we will get rid of some leeches and recover our community power. Now that I think about it going to zero may be the best thing for Hive, way too many people are living off of something that is a horrible investment, not the end of the world of those few people abandon the ship because there is no more money to be made for them.
What you said at the end of the comment is something that I would actually like to see... It's not a secret that we have some bad apples among our whales, and it would be nice to see them capitulating and leaving... We need to shuffle the cards to have a "fair chance" to succeed... Plus, some of our whales didn't buy their tokens... they mined them and never lost their % in the Hive cake... 😉
Maybe that's the reason why many of them didn't capitulate... You got tokens for free... even 1 cent is a profit ;)
This is exactly the conversation we need. I was trying to suggest something similar within the SkateHive community, with ads for skate companies and brands.
If you compare the business model of social media with Hive, they’re both free, but social media monetizes your attention through advertising and data collection, and we do none of that. That’s a lot of value we’re just leaving in the table cause some ppl don’t like ads.
Meanwhile Brave shows us a model where we can give people control over what they see, or if their data can be used. We could essentially be curating advertisements, as well as selling data with consent, and have the revenue be shared through a Hive buy back program.
Other ideas I’ve had include crazy things like focusing on the emerging demand for open source scientific research journals, archives of journalistic materials, training open source ai models, and decentralized versions of any other thing out there that have been too centralized.
Hey, I barely know the SkateHive community but highly respect the community, I swear to you everyone on Hive knows you guys because of how active you guys are in a very good way! Keep rocking and rolling, even without not knowing much I heard enough about your porjects to respect a lot. At a Hive event we had in Spain many weeks you guys were mentioned a few times because the members are active and creative with creating websites and having brand new ideas.
Well, everything on Hive is public in a way that not even Facebook dares to. It is just that we do not monetize it, but it is very easy for anyone to just scrape data off of Hive and know about your interests and target ads to you outside of Hive. Hive does the dirty job of creating and collecting and preserving data, outsiders benefit from the data neatly stored about us.
Wow that’s cool to hear! Thank the kids in Brazil, and Africa for that! They’ve been taking to Hive like bees to honey!😉 Even had some of our members skating across Africa with Jaay Films.
While I just sponsored an historic longboard race in Canada, and currently working on the video from it.
But of course all this attention is wasted if we don’t find a way to monetize, and maintain it!
100% agree. Fix inflation, fix hive. That simple. Otherwise still great fintech project. One of the most interesting use case in my opinion.
Excellent article, whose ideas I wholeheartedly agree with.
IMO, HIVE should have committed to real growth long ago, focusing on business ventures, external revenue streams, advertising, and clear metrics.
It's very clear that everything they've done hasn't worked, and empty promises aren't enough.
We must transform HIVE into a growth-oriented blockchain.
Apart from the DHF and the technical onboarding problem there is actually even more: My criticisms concerning the social mechanisms on HIVE include, among others:
The majority of all upvotes are automated (via autovotes or blindly following voting trails), meaning most users don't even bother to manually search for good posts, actually read them, evaluate them, or curate them. Additionally, curation rewards decrease within the seven-day voting window, which further favors automated voting over slower, manual curation. Posts older than two days are generally ignored. The entire voting system is designed more for speed than for promoting quality content.
New users — unless they happen to get the attention of a HIVE whale (receiving fat upvotes on a daily base then) or are discovered and deemed "vote-worthy" by a trail leader — have an extremely hard time gaining traction on HIVE. Established users mostly vote for each other, paying little attention to the quality of the content they support (circular voting: "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours!"). Automated voting, in particular, prevents newcomers' posts from being noticed.
HIVE's "reputation" system is a bad joke because it has nothing to do with the quality of a user's content — it's solely based on the rewards they have earned so far (ironically, accounts with the highest reputation — which I would rather call a "greed score" — are often the worst offenders when it comes to circular voting).
Contrary to the glorified myth, HIVE is not truly decentralized. The users with by far the highest (often distributed across multiple accounts) "HIVE Power" gained it primarily through early mining and the use of bidbots.
When it comes to selecting "top witnesses" or supporting HIVE proposals, there's no way around them. If you look at the witness rankings from 2016 onward, you'll see many of the same names still entrenched in the top spots today, often supporting each other — hardly a sign of a vibrant democracy or true decentralization. :)
This is one reason I don't seriously invest in HIVE: I have no desire to enrich these whales further by contributing to the coin's appreciation.
Downvotes are undoubtedly important and necessary to combat spam and plagiarism, but they are also frequently used (often automatically, without even reading the target's posts) to silence unpopular discussion participants. Here is one example among many.
So far, the HIVE community has not made any serious effort to address downvotes issued due to disagreements or personal grudges (one possible solution — among others — could be an account that neutralizes such downvotes using HIVE Power delegated by many users).
Unlike Bitcoin, HIVE has no max supply, which (along with the aforementioned issues) significantly dampens my expectations for future price appreciation.
Despite these criticisms, HIVE does have some positives:
HIVE enables the permanent, censorship-resistant storage of valuable content (e.g., personal accounts, ideas, and thoughts) on a blockchain.
HIVE offers the potential to earn money through writing.
Technologically, HIVE is quite mature (fast, feeless transactions, the ability to send HIVE to a username instead of a cryptic string of numbers).
There are indeed interesting, thought-provoking writers in this microcosm.
Personally, I write simply for myself (see HIVE's first positive point), whenever I feel like it and believe I have something worth sharing. If other users enjoy my posts or engage with me via comments, that's great — if not, no problem either. With this mindset, I can tolerate the platform reasonably well. :)
I actually wonder if it would be a good thing if the HIVE price went down to 1 cent because then only these users might stay who's main aim is to create good, memorable content instead of trying to enrich themselves. That might be the chance of a completely new beginning.
I create some actual content... just photos, notes about gardening. I follow a few others that also are actually still creating that kind of content. Blogging basically. I use any earnings to fund Splinterlands. Not a tech guy or crypto investor. My opinion is this is a hobby, niche community. It might have had a moment, maybe an opportunity even but I think that has passed. Its still a fun niche. Some small groups doing the blogging, social media stuff plus some techies that like the blockchain/crypto angle.