Does Hive have a Future? Perhaps ... but it will need an Alliance.
On Thanksgiving Day, I dropped by Hive to say “Hi” to a few old friends. To my surprise, Hive was trading at $1.69 and Twitter had exploded with Hive-adoration as everyone started breaking out their best bottles of bravado and braggadocio. As an ex-hedge fund manager, skepticism is my middle name, so I decided to do a little digging to see if this momentous breakout seemed justified.
Following is the comment-reply thread from my interaction with @cryptogee, one of those aforementioned friends:
Image: https://ecency.com/hive-133987/@penguinpablo/daily-hive-stats-report-friday-november-26-2021
Image: https://ecency.com/hive-133987/@penguinpablo/daily-hive-stats-report-friday-november-26-2021
.
I should have known better than to drop in on Cryptogee. Somehow that bugger always manages to trigger a thought process requiring a long-winded response.
Situational Awareness
Blockchains do not exist in a vacuum. If it takes a particular blockchain a year to accomplish what others accomplish in a month, the world shrugs and moves on without it. And that's what happened to Hive. Despite this recent price pump, Hive still only has 14,000 Active Daily Users and is not even ranked in the Top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap.
Acknowledging the realities of one's circumstances is, as they say in the military, "situational awareness." Pretending there are ten guys on the other side of the hill does nothing to negate the existence of a hundred. Irrespective of explanations or excuses, Hive is no longer even a near-peer of its competitors.
So, given this recognition of reality, what ought the blockchain do?
Form an Alliance
Throughout human history, most states (and city-states) were pawns in "The Great Game" of "The Great Powers" of their day. Lacking the ability to mount an independent defense, the less powerful formed alliances with one of the then-contemporary Great Powers. In ancient Greece, for example, there were, at one time, more than 1,500 polises (roughly, "city-states"), almost all of which either allied with Athens or Sparta. NATO in relation to the U.S. would be a contemporary military example, while the European Union in relation to Germany, a civilian one.
For any alliance to work, however, it must be beneficial to all parties concerned and hence the less powerful must bring something to the partnership that is valued by The Great Power with which it seeks to ally.
NFTs are the Great Game & the Great Powers are Forming
In the CryptoSphere, NFTs have become "The Great Game" and the likes of FTX.US, Coinbase and Crypto.com are rapidly becoming "The Great Powers" (mega-NFT marketplaces). The logic is simple: Given their gargantuan capital resources and infrastructure specifically designed for trading, they set sail in aircraft carriers while others set sail in canoes. Undoubtedly, there will be an army of challengers -- but not many that are credible. Concentrated capital is a fiercesome weapon in the hands of an adversary and as The Great Powers become entrenched, venture capitalists, and investors generally, will become more reluctant to fund competing endeavors. This is a dynamic that many in the CryptoSphere don't seem to see ... and I've frequently wondered if such visual impairment is the result of willful blindness. To many, anything that's not DECENTRALIZED is, a priori, bad.
Any financial exchange is a meeting place for:
a.) People trying to sell things; and
b.) People willing (and able) to buy that which is for sale.
Such dynamic strongly favors the creation of a small number of CENTRALIZED exchanges where everyone congregates so that buyers and sellers can easily find one another. This is why, in the real world, there are only a small number of stock, bond and derivatives exchanges, or for that matter, art auction houses. And, we can see this same dynamic already occurring in the CryptoSphere -- while there are innumerable DEXs (decentralized exchanges) scattered about, their volumes pale in comparison to that of the centralized exchanges. Throw in regulatory compliance, institutional market makers, institutional investors, greater liquidity (tighter bid-ask spreads), lower fees, etc. ... and the writing is on the wall. This same dynamic, I'd proffer, will be fundamental to the formation of NFT marketplaces.
What Does Hive Bring to the Table?
Hive's capital resources are too small to be of interest to anyone. And, its technology is nothing that any of The Great Powers don't already possess, or that which could not be obtained, quite easily, elsewhere.
So, what's left?
1. Curation
Hive possesses 14,000 crypto diehards willing to do almost anything to see their blockchain succeed. At first glance, this may not seem like much, but it could address a problem for which none of The Great Powers currently have a solution: curation. (And keep in mind that even at the height of its power, Sparta could only field 10,000 soldiers.)
Anyone who's spent even a few minutes scrolling through NFTs on the larger NFT exchanges cannot have failed to notice that 99% of NFTs are utter crap. Let there be a curse upon the first of the Illuminati who trots out that old saw, "quality is subjective," in the comments section. Yes, quality is subjective -- but not so subjective that anyone thinks Elvis couldn't sing ... or that I can.
The Trending pages of most NFT marketplaces are dominated by PfPs (Profile Pic art, that is to say ... cartoons). Such "art" is extremely unlikely to appeal to the "mainstream," the majority of the population without which cryptos have no future. This is not an assertion difficult to prove. Simply, spend a few minutes showing your non-crypto friends the NFTs on Trending pages ... and take note of their howls of derision.
Some NFT marketplaces have attempted to remedy the situation by hiring "professional curators." But here's the thing: typically, such so-called "art experts" are amongst the most insufferably pompous pinheads to have even walked the face of the Earth. Much like movie critics (and mimes), no one with an IQ over 2 agrees with their artistic proclamations and proclivities. To wit, here's an exposition about why paintings comprised of "white paint on white canvas" are actually worth the tens of millions of dollars that a handful of "thought leaders" paid for them. Apparently, the rest of us cave-dwelling knuckle-draggers are insufficiently sophisticated to appreciate the subtleties of the sublime.
.
2. Artist-Audience Engagement
To the best of my knowledge, only one NFT platform (other than Hive) even plans to have a comment-reply section. But, as every Hivian knows, it is the interaction between authors and their audience that creates engagement and reinforces the bonds of friendship. Moreover, an audience's applause provides "social proof" to third parties (prospective buyers) that others share their favorable impression of a creator's creation.
Hive's upvoting system also allows those without the financial resources to buy an NFT to, nevertheless, reward an artist for their efforts ... while earning curation awards in the process. Moreover, it allows artists to reciprocate by upvoting comments, rewarding those involved with the elevation of their work.
Neither Twitter nor Discord, the primary venues used for post-publishing promotion, come close to replicating this kind of intimate one-on-one engagement.
3. Promotion
At present, if Shakespeare, Da Vinci and Beethoven returned from the grave and collaborated to create an NFT -- it wouldn't earn a nickel absent an effective promotional campaign or lottery-levels of luck. Starting a fire requires both tinder and a spark and Hive is perfectly designed to deliver both.
What I'm arguing is that Hive ought not be striving to compete with The Great Powers to mint NFTs, it ought be striving to compete with Twitter for their promotion. The former is a fight Hive would be hard-pressed to win; the latter, a fight it would be hard-pressed to lose.
Years ago, when I regularly posted on Steemit, I was part of a group called the PowerHouse Creatives (PHC). @theycallmedan organized a contest in which the team that received the greatest number of votes (from Steemians at large) would receive a substantial delegation of STEEM. At the time, PHC had less than 100 members and we faced off against teams many times our size -- some representing entire countries. It was the mother of uphill battles. But we out-hustled everyone, post-promoting not just on Steemit or in Discord; but on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as well. To be candid, we drove everyone nuts but there was no question in anyone's mind who wanted it the most. And we didn't just beg. As the name suggests, the PowerHouse Creatives were a group capable of creating great content ... and we did.
And so, we won.
Here's one of the poems I wrote for the occasion.
If one wants to catch a fish, one would be well advised to forgo fancy lures in favor of finding a hole full of fish. If Hive wants to attract mainstream users, it must cast its net in waters where they swim ... on mainstream social media sites. Getting their attention on such sites, however, will take more than chest-thumping and hullaballoo (it hasn't worked so far, has it?). "Great art" is a "shiny object" as good as any with which to bait the hook.
Word-of-Mouth is Naught but the Telling of Stories
Those of us in advertising have long advised our clients that word-of-mouth is the most effective form of advertisement. But how does one actually go about getting people to talk about one's products or services?
Word-of-mouth is naught but the telling of stories ... and the stories people like to tell possess highly predictable attributes. Just as no one wants to tell an unfunny joke, no one wants to tell a boring story. People tell stories that elicit emotional reactions in those to whom the stories are told -- and stories which make the teller seem smart, funny or intriguing in its telling.
Here's an experiment: Find a high-priced NFT depicting an ape cartoon. Now, find a non-crypto friend and try telling them a story about it. See how long you can hold your friend's attention and be sure to note their emotional state throughout. Achieving virality amongst crypto enthusiasts, I'd submit, is not the same as achieving virality amongst those who are ... sane.
Hive is perfectly configured to be the "proving ground" that separates NFTs which possess mass appeal from those likely to be little more than crypto curiosities. Moreover, by becoming the "collective curators" of NFTs minted by a Great Power, Hive would generate enormous amounts of exposure for itself in the process ... on someone else's dime.
A Hypothetical Example
Let's say, hypothetically, there is a brilliant poet and satirist named @chillsquire (who, amongst other things, is a damnably handsome man). And, let's say, he has created an NFT Collection that is actually the basis of a 9-month-long Great Power marketing campaign masquerading as a contest (one so cleverly devised that it redefines the meaning of "gamification"). To ensure that the contest attracts lots of participants and media coverage, let's also say that @chillsquire "blackmails" (in a good way) the Great Power into providing a $1,000,000 Grand Prize plus hundreds of thousands of dollars in weekly prizes.
Given the inability to communicate on The Great Power's NFT marketplace, @chillsquire would need to find a place to post the contest's rather lengthy rules. He'd also need a place to provide weekly contest clues (found on hyperlinked third-party NFTs and/or blog posts) and to disclose the prior week's winners. Lastly, he'd need a way to interact with contest participants as interaction is what drives enthusiasm and participation.
Of course, such place would also need a way for The Great Power to actively participate, to stoke interest while doling out additional daily rewards to the thousands of contest participants involved with its elevation.
A myriad of social media sites could fulfill such a role but none so well, I suspect, as Hive. Obviously, Hive could provide all the necessary communication. But it would also be able to provide an easy and efficient way for The Great Power to reward participants independent of the contest itself -- simply, buy a pile of Hive and upvote participants' comments on @chillsquire's contest posts. At the end of the contest, The Great Power could retain its stake (for use in subsequent campaigns) or liquidate and get its money back ... plus or minus the amount of Hive's price appreciation or depreciation since the time of purchase.
On that last point, Hive's price appreciation or depreciation: imagine that @chillsquire was smart enough to include in his NFT Collection a number of NFTs designed to attract other Fortune 500 companies so that once the present contest was finished, another might begin ... but with a different sponsor.
Who wins? The Great Power gets an extremely effective, yet relatively cheap, marketing campaign; Hive gets a ton of new users (the contest participants) and, quite likely, a number of new investors, both large and small; and, mainstream social media users (the contest participants) get introduced to the CryptoSphere in a manner that is fun and engaging ... and, for approximately 100 of them, very remunerative. And @chillsquire, one could only hope, gets filthy rich from the sale of his NFTs ... which seems only fitting as it was all his idea in the first place.
In Sum
You go to war with the army that you have ... but the army that you have determines the battles you can fight.
If Hive is to have a future, Hivians need to take stock of their surroundings and adapt accordingly. The CryptoSphere of tomorrow will not be the CryptoSphere of today.
.
Quill
Funny — today I was thinking of your posts of old.
I'll read this one later, though. Sleep wins.
!BEER
Hey Manny.
Good to see you again.
Quill
View or trade
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BEERfrom @manoldonchev for you. Enjoy it!Did you know that you can use BEER at dCity game to **buy dCity NFT cards** to rule the world.
Thanks Manny. 🍻
Quill
Art Basel in Miami is fast approaching and, presumably, will be attended by some of the same artisitic luminaries I mentionned in the post ... the "art experts."
Here's a link to a Best Seller from Art Basel's 2019's gathering:
https://nypost.com/2019/12/05/this-banana-duct-taped-to-a-wall-is-yours-for-120k-at-art-basel/
Quill
Quill!
@tipu curate
Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 65/85) Liquid rewards.
Denise, that was very generous. Thank you. 🙏
Quill
It's my pleasure.
The building of an economy takes time and commitment. Perseverance through the lean and reserve in the fat.
We will get there but of course it will take time and up and downs. If what you care about is a decentralized system that reward people based on merit and commitment than a slower growth curve is needed.
We grow too fast and we will attract the opportunistic that are just here for material gain. We are a slow revolution, Quill.
Hivelanders are ride or die.
Hey Pryde.
I appreciate the sentiment and I agree with most of it. That said, as I argued in the article, blockchains don't live in a vacuum. To stay in the game, Hive is going to have to do something to remain relevant and its resources, relative to others, is not an immaterial consideration. "No strategy" is a strategy, just a very poor one.
The problem with Hive is that it has a hundred.
It's good to see the old crew again. And, there's no question that Hive has the best "community spirit" of any social media platform I've ever encountered.
BTW, "Hivelanders" ... that's actually the best moniker I've heard. "Hivers" and "Hivians" sound lame by comparison. I hope you don't mind if I borrow it.
Quill
A truly decentralized blockchain will have many different strategies by its very nature. Maybe hundreds ... if we really catch on, thousands.
From my point of view as a blogger and 'social' democrat with a mean libertarian streak, I see newbies develop into dolphins and whales from blogging, my feed is my own, and censorship is null. SUCCESS.
The other thing have seen by sticking in there and sticking with it is monetary and influence gain. SUCCESS. A place where I express myself freely and aid others in doing the same. WOW!!!
If we talk about the nature of capitalism as Adam Smith envisioned it ... there is an invisible hand guiding the economy or in this case the block chain. We have an opportunity by combining mercantilism with a decentralized but somewhat collective ethos to build just that.
We have witnesses and developers, obviously with more influence at macro level control than the rest of us, I am thankful the heavy lifters.
I am going to verge into the "I told you so' land but those who HODLed and blogged these past few years, weathered the ups and downs, would have seen roughly a 15 000 percent return on investment.
That's huge.
We got this, Quill; all you need to do is settle in for the ride:)
Day-um the girl does have a point. 😁
>A truly decentralized blockchain will have many different strategies by its very nature. Maybe hundreds ... if we really catch on, thousands.
Jack of all trades, master of none.
No company, army, country, organization (of any kind) ... in the entire history of humanity ... has ever survived, let alone thrived, by doing as you suggest. If you think I'm wrong, name an instance.
Arguably the greatest military slaughter in history, the Battle of Cannae, was the result of the Romans switching their legion's commander (and hence, strategy) every day. Why did the Romans do this? So as not to hurt either of the generals feelings. They both wanted glory. "You get your day, today, then Johnny will get his tomorrow." This way, everyone gets a participation trophy. Flabberghasted, Hannibal took note of the Romans daily troop redeployments (one of the Roman generals was a defensive general, the other, offensive) and forced a battle during a transition. The Romans, despite being numerically superior (and being Romans) were eviscerated.
"Concentration of Force at the Decisive Point" is the one strategic imperative that ALL Great Generals have agreed upon throughout history. And not only did they all agree that it was an important aspect of warfare, they all agreed that it was the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of warfare. But, you'd have me believe that "it's different this time?" That this time, everyone can pursue their own thing with no thought to the affect it will have upon the rest of the blockchain ... and that everything will turn out fine.
Over the past 3.5 years, I've watched EOS drop for the #5 ranked crypto, with a market cap of $17.7 billion (in the midst of a crypto winter), to its current ranking, #50, with a market cap of $3.9 billion (during the mother of all bull runs) ... despite its originators (Block.one) having conducted the largest ICO in history (USD $4.1 billion).
Why did this happen?
Because B1, despite its deep pockets and a dream team of developers, provided no direction or leadership on the blockchain, and neither did anyone else. Everyone just pimped their own projects with no thought given to what ought to have been everyone's common strategic goals. Many tried to bring order to the chaos but a consensus could never be reached. Everyone just wanted to keep doing their own thing while letting someone else deal with the problems. And, they too beat their chests proclaiming their "mean streaks of libertarianism." No one was going to tell them what to do.
Sacred cows make good steaks.
A couple of months ago, things finally got so bad that the community essentially rebelled and formed the EOS Foundation to take over from B1, the development company. Dan Larimer left B1 and created Eden, a community governance organization based upon "fractal democracy." And lastly, Brock Pierce traded in his shares in B1 for half of B1's EOS stake ... and with it formed a venture capital company to invest in EOS projects. So many millions of dollars in grants have been flying around of late that it's hard to keep track of it all. And yet, EOS continues its descent down the rankings. Despite all these positive developments and goodwill gestures, EOS simply has no credibility within the crypto investment community and regaining it is proving to be a Herculean task. EOS, once referred to as the "Ethereum-Killer," is now burned in effigy. Working groups have been hastily assembled to study how to fix ... EOS' wallets. Let that sink in: after 3.5 years, and the most illustrious launch in crypto history, they're still working on ... wallets.
At some point, EOS may simply fall below its "critical mass," at which time the blockchain will simply cease to function. Before that happens, though, investors are likely to sense impending doom and simply dump their holdings en masse ... which will, of course, cause the price of EOS to fall below its critical mass. Hive (like all blockchains) also has a critical mass, below which it cannot exist. I don't know what that number is and neither does anyone else. But the inability to quantify it does not negate its existence.
>I am going to verge into the "I told you so' land but those who HODLed and blogged these past few years, weathered the ups and downs, would have seen roughly a 15 000 percent return on investment. That's huge.
15,000 percent return on investment!?
Hmmm, let's think this through. That's $1 invested then, being worth $150 today. As I write this, Hive is trading at $2.53. For your number to be accurate, one's purchase price would have had to have been $0.017 (and that's rounded up). Less than 2 cents. To get that price, you'd have to go back to STEEM's ninja mining days (I don't know the exact date as I can't access that far back on my computer). Who got that price? Ned.
Speaking of ROI, how many hours have you spent creating posts, comments and replies since you joined the blockchain? If you were to take your current wallet balance and divide it by said number of hours, what would that equate to in hourly remuneration? I'm tempted to calculate this for myself, for the sake of making a point, but I suspect my sanity would be sacrificed.
In any event, I think you're missing the gist of my argument. I'm not arguing that you or anyone else shouldn't continue doing exactly what you're doing. And, as you say, it's not all about the money. But, as explained above, some of it is ... and a great deal more than most would care to admit. How else would one explain this recent outpouring of euphoria? Hive goes up, ebullience ... Hive goes down, depression. It seems like a lot of holier than thous are full of you know what.
What I'm actually arguing is that, at some point, Hive has to become "excellent" at something. You pick it: social media (textual); social media (video); gaming; NFTs ... whatever. But it has to have a claim to fame or it will simply fade into irrelevancy. "Very good" is not enough ... its merely the table stakes that allows one to have a seat at the table. To win, one must be better than all the other "very goods" against which one is competing. This is the way life works and nothing about cryptocurrencies, decentralization or Satoshi's Dream changes it by a lick.
BTW, as someone who spent 20 years managing hedge funds, I'll let you in on a secret: there is not a single professional investment manager on the planet who thinks "HODLing" is an "investment strategy" (let alone a good one). Indeed, HODLing is akin to blowing on one's dice and hoping for the best.
Imagine you own a house in Vancouver that was recently appraised at $1,000,000. Someone comes along and offers you $1,100,000. You decline the offer because you believe the influx of Chinese millionaires trying to get the hell out of China before things go south, will continue ... and hence, that your house will continue to appreciate in value given continued strong demand. OK, I suppose that would be an example of "rational HODLing." But what if someone offered you $10,000,000? Would you still HODL? That's $9,000,000 over the appaised value. Why wouldn't you just sell the house, buy another for $1,000,000 (with no mortgage) and put the rest into your retirement account? Clearly, HODLing under such circumstances would be insane. So why would such straight line logic not apply to cryptocurrencies as well?
When people ignore the fundamentals, the results are rarely pretty.
Quill
I shall begin with a quote from local media where an entertainment program's reporter interviewed a drunk, homeless (or so appearing) dude on the streets:
A rough translation, perhaps. It sounded funnier in our native language.
Now I should say I am a fan/ a disciple of that kind of cold, realistic, chillsquire logic. That @chillsquire account name is quite awesome. I think you should claim it. Which reminds me I have to claim a certain account name as well but I don't know when I'll even spend the time to secure its keys. It would need some five minutes or so of concentration, after all...
To summarize your warnings...Hive might be on to something or even many things but for each of these things there is someone who could easily get there first if they would put their vastly superior resources into it.
For each of those things, do we believe that nobody would recognize their potential and act upon it before we get there?
Then again, some glorious battles have been won and the loot has been great for those who followed the generals to those moments. I've mostly held back and I've already missed a couple of chances to get innocently filthy relatively rich. Still here, honing my skills/knowledge, though. The problem, as you put it, is I am not currently performing, I am not promoting them. And by the time I am ready with a plan, I might have missed an opportunity of a lifetime.
So could the Hive but I don't think it sits as passive. Alliances are indeed being forged, little by little, and I think most of the pumps are actually not NFT related but results of those alliances. Most of which I have no time to dig info about. So, I might be speaking based on a feeling. But something must have caused it.
P.S. When I said I thought of your old posts, it was exactly about your passion for argument and your case against the bid bots. And here we are today — bidbotless.
Hey Manny.
Here's the part of the article I think people should really take note of:
During the California, Alaska and Yukon gold rushes, millions of people the world over descended upon rivers and streams, determined to find their fortunes. A few did ... most did not. There was, however, one group of peole who made out like bandits: the shopkeepers that sold the miners picks and shovels (and liquor and prostitutes).
The miners approached the opportunity directly, relying upon an all-or-nothing lucky strike. The shopkeepers approached to same opportunity tangentially, profiting indirectly. This was a difference in strategy. Ironically, the shopkeeper strategy is that being persued by The Great Powers in their creation of mega-minting platforms ... thousands of artisits won't earn a penny, but a few will strike it rich (the Pareto Principle in action). In any event, The Great Powers will get a cut.
To be perfectly accurate, what I'm suggesting is that Hive service the sevicer. Analoguously, that we sell picks and shovels to the shopkeeper so that he can sell them to the miners.
For whatever reason, Twitter has become the preferred promotional venue for NFTs. But Twitter tweets are restricted to 280 characters. That is a HUGE disadvanatage and one that is not easily overcome. Hive's ability to provide artisits with unlimited space to tell their stories is a self-evident advantage. Combine that with the ability of artists and their audiences to reward one another with upvotes ... and the result is a very potent alternative. This is a fight Hive could win and it would result in a massive influx of new users ... and without having to incur costs or rewite code
Artists mint their NFTs and drop a Hive link in the NFT's desciption box. Easy.
About the bidbots ... I can't tell you how many times I restrained myself from publishing a scathing op-ed on the subject. How many times did Whales and Witnesses insult and cajole, derisively asserting that banning bidbots was technically impossible?
And yet, here Hive is ... bidbotless and blissful. Exactly as I said it could be.
***Quill ***
I don't know what it was about
steemitHive, but, once I got settled in, I was addicted to it. I might argue that it is not about the money, but, the money is what makes it attractive. It has been a slow process, but, it is showing growth, even if the charts don't show the numbers you would like to see.Money aside, the best part about Hive is the friendships I have made, they have meetups all the time and even last week had a virtual HiveFest. Everyone loved it. I have wanted to ask a million times how would I fit into NFT, because frankly, I cannot see it nor compete with what is out there. But, I was a little embarrassed.
Anyway, I am always happy to see you.
Hive is small potatoes!
I'm not able to comment on posts unless they are tagged #pob or #proofofbrain due to constant downvoting by the Hive-cabal (a form of censorship in itself) so I am just commenting with this account - a negative rep cannot be threatened with downvoting because all reps below zero are free from oppression!
My upvotes are not worth much in POB at the moment but give it a week or so and I'll be able to dole out some big upvotes in VYB (Verify Your Brain) tokens!
https://peakd.com/proofofbrain/@vyb.vyb/new-tribe-and-token-verify-your-brain-oror-vybrainium-vyb
@frot
Good to see you post, Quill.
I am not sure if the ramp is from NFTs, perhaps it is a part. I like how Pryde said we Hivers are ride or die lol. That could be a part too.
I look at the same stats you do there, and draw the same conclusion. However, I am not sure if the Splinterlands phenomenon has been fully expressed in those figures. I know a lot of folk have joined to play that and some hive is burned in the process I believe.
However I think the main driver has been Farcebook. Once they started the metaverse bandwagon the pump has been pumping. Mind you, not solely with Hive but any other chain that is metaverse-like.
I guess we may never know, but all I do know is it sure looks nice.
Certainly at least a part. And we can even say that it is a huge part, because Splinterlands cards are NFTs, and Splinterlands is brought and still bringing thousands of people to the Hive blockchain every day.
While many only play Splinterlands, some of them are active on the blogging/social network platform too. We met a few good friends because of the huge success of Splinterlands. For example one of them is @savvyplayer. He registered one year ago (on 2020.11.28), and he is socially very active on the platform.
Thank you for tagging me, appreciating my activeness on Hive, and greeting me for my Hive birthday.
I give you some !PIZZA and !ALIVE with !LUV.
@savvyplayer(8/10) gave you
@xplosive! You Are Alive so I just staked 0.1 $ALIVE to your account on behalf of @savvyplayer. (9/10)
The tip has been paid for by the We Are Alive Tribe through the earnings on @alive.chat, feel free to swing by our daily chat any time you want.
Well, well, well. Looks what the funky winds of reasonable logic diatribes brought to us again?
So, are you back here in search of few old friends again eh?
Are they only the lettered members and colleagues of your PowerHouse Creatives Brotherhood? Or are you also in the quest to meet again with the stoics philosophical rebels, the renegades, the outcasts, the misfits and the old pink MoFos of the flamboyant lodge of the sense of humor too?
Hahaha funker! Welcome back poet. Glad to read your arcane and zany irreverent prose once again. I was already missing your style to spit the inners of your quirky mind out from some time. And with this post, I see that that style still remains intact despite the long sabbatical. Hahahaha
Yeah mate. In relation to what you indicate in this post. It is also my opinion that those who currently manage and have the control and destination of this place still have a lot to learn from the point of view of professional marketing, promotion, advertising, sales, RRPP and Strategic Alliances to bring the project to fruition in the immediate future.
I also notice most of them as the hodlers of too much naivety, randomness and ambiguity mixed with the distinctive enthusiasm typical of the youth who are basically lovers of video games. And as in video games, they seem to enjoy more slowly leveling up the game in unexpected and surprising ways without much commitment and serious planning ahead of time of what would really be the logical steps to follow in what indeed the new economy of the business world would demand.
Definitely, at the moment, it's just a lucrative passtime and funny game to them. And they seem to ignore that without an agile, direct and immediate action towards those professional financial fronts in the real world, the competition will leave them (all of us) swallowing dust sooner than later if we do not put the batteries on quickly. Too many great white sharks are already swimming in these crypto waters right now to afford to be careless.
That's why brainy articles like this one of yours have to be taken into account as soon as possible. We need a voice of experience in these promotional matters. And for the same reason, I am going to reblog this post. It doesn't matter if it's barely four dead cats who still read me. Hahahaha
Cheers!! :)
😂😂😂 That line is simply ... beautiful. 😂😂😂
"... reasonable logic diatribes ..." -- I wish I'd thought of that. Apropos.
One would think that logic and strategic planning would be a good thing. But, in the CryptoSphere, everything seems to get turned on its head. But that's all about to change. Indeed, I predict that 2022 will be the Year of the Great Reckoning.
For example, FTX.US, an extremely profitable crypto derivatives exchange that has launched an NFT marketplace, has recently signed Tom Brady (football), Stephen Curry (basketball) and Shohei Ohtani (baseball) as athletic endorsers. They also bought the naming rights for the stadium in which the Miami Heat play. They've also entered into a strategic marketing alliance with Mercedes and will release a Super Bowl commerical in early 2022.
Crypto.com responded by buying the naming rights for the stadium in which the LA Lakers play (formerly the Staples Center) ... for $700 million!!! (That's almost Hive's entire market cap).
Coinbase (publically traded) will now undoubtedly respond in kind.
These are classic (and very expensive) real world marketing initatives and they are extremely aggressive. Here's the point: the CryptoSphere is growing up and the barriers to entry will rapidly become much larger than what they once were. What worked in the past won't work in the future. Analogously, smaller blockchains (like Hive) are bragging because they possess top-of-line bi-planes while The Great Powers are fielding flights of F22 Raptors.
Firepower matters.
The future of crypto is entirely dependent upon the ability of blockchains to attract mainstream users. To become "household names." In this Great Game, Hive will not be able to directly compete against the Great Powers. It simply will not possess the size or scale. The only way it will survive is if it finds a way to ride the coattails of a Great Power.
And hence my post.
Quill
This aspect needs the most improvement, to be honest. And the Hive blockchain needs content consumers. Much more content consumers. Nowadays most of the current Hive users are focusing on content creation, and this results in a lot of overlooked/ignored posts.
Absolutely true.
There is an incredible imbalance between active content creators and passive content consumers. Hive's strategic imperative must be to onboard more of the latter.
Quill
Well, greetings @quillfire, nice to see you around these parts again! I was just chatting to someone on Discord the other day and we were remarking on all the familiar faces suddenly putting in an appearance.
Coming up on five years of playing this gig, I think Hive has a future. I also think "token price" is a poor indicator of anything much. Let's not forget that we're in an industry where the 10th largest market cap coin (DOGE) is a joke!
One of the things you say here that I really relate to has to do with the "language" of blockchain developers. It all feels very much like a latter-day version of what I used to deal with, working in usability in the IT industry in the late 1990s. The developers/coders, the marketing geeks and management all spoke three completely different languages.
I think Hive has a future because it's slowly heading down the road of ETH and BNB... It'll be less and less "about Hive" and more and more about "what you can DO on Hive." Recently, we had a big jolt because of the instant sellout of HivePunks. NFTs in general are doing well. Over the past 3-4 months, Splinterlands (which is free-standing, but Hive based) has been driving tens of thousands of new accounts a week. LeoFinance (which is also Hive based) has several things in the works, one of which (currently known as "Project Blank") will bring a decentralized twitter-like app to Hive... but it will be its own beast.
Of course, all that is separate from the question of "Does Hive, the BLOGGING site, have a future?"
I tend to look at things relatively speaking. Is Hive fairly valued for what it is? Let's compare to Ethereum... after adjusting for number of tokens outstanding, is ETH 300x more valuable than Hive, as a property? Is BNB 160x more valuable? What IS "fair value?" In that particular context, I'd say Hive was undervalued till about a couple of weeks back, and now it's closer to fair value, in the context of overall crypto trends. Is $20 Hive (which some like to toss around) realistic? Not from where I am sitting, except maybe as a momentary over-exuberant bubble.
As you pointed out, Hive has something most projects don't have: An almost rabid community... and that's an extremely valuable... albeit intangible, asset.
Hey Mate,
As ususal, intelligent and articulate commentry. And you hit upon a subject about which I've spent a great deal of time thinking: relativity.
The trick to a good stock (or crypto) analysis is considering ALL variables and putting them into perspective. A doubling of revenue is impressive unless it is accompanied by a quadrupling of expense.
An exerpt from another comment:
If one concurs with my assertion about the future of crypto being entirely dependent upon attracting mainstream users, then marketing capacity is a critical factor. To that end, The Great Powers are spending more on marketing initiatives than Hive's entire market cap! THAT ... is going to have consequences.
As I argued in my article, NFT minting is going to get EXTREMELY competitive and it is a business that will strongly favor a small number of centralized marketplaces. Is it realistic that Hive can compete given its relative lack of resources? Gaming will also be EXTREMELY competitive and the same argument could be made about Splinterlands. To be honest, I don't know a lot about Splinterlands but some of the analyses I've read give me pause. For example, it is built on the Play-to-Earn model but to actually earn anything, realistically, now requires an upfront investment of $600-$800. That's a pretty substanital obstacle.
As I argued in the post, blockchains do not live in a vacuum. What the other guys are doing mattters as it materially affects one's own viability as a going concern.
Quill
Hive as a blogging platform hasn't moved forward too much but hive as an eco-system has evolved massively.
14k users isn't the real story as splinterlands has over 100k users per day that aren't counted in those stats.
We now have nft's liquidity, dapps, games, ect...
Partnerships with multiple exchanges, dex's, marketsquare, telos and other chains.
It might seem like things are standing still but they are slowly spreading into everywhere. The next step that we can see are large groups joining together. Splinterlands is bringing in thousands of players from guilds in one go.
Scorum is bridging to hive, so is somee for blogging.
The pump is strange but there are 6 airdrops for hive holders before January. People don't want to sell as much as before and there is no steemit inc dumping value weekly.
I know that i'm all in with hive but i can see where all of this is going and i like it. Now we just need more people shilling and more devs building to pick up the pace.
Our strongest point is the community and if we hit a bear market we will keep growing while others fall away.
Great post though. I really enjoyed the read, i take your point from it and it's good to see you back again.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Hey Mate.
Good comment. Everything you say is true. There are lots of positive developments on Hive and within its ecosystem. I question, though, whether they'll be enough. When Coinbase announced it would be launching an NFT marketplace at the end of 2021, 2.5 million people signed-up on their waiting list within a matter of days. Consider the magnitude of difference in the scales we're talking about when compared to Hive.
Something that comes to mind is a quote by Wayne Gretsky (the "Great Gretsky"). Asked what made him different than other hockey players (and hence, "Great"), he didn't mention technical skills such as skating or shooting or passing. His response:
Every player against which Gretsky competed was, in his own right, an incredible hockey player. Hence, it was not superior technical skill that set him apart ... but rather a superior strategy for implementing those skills.
As I've mentioned elsewhere in these comments, I predict that 2022 will be The Year of the Great Reckoning. Like what happened during the dot.com bust, Actual Performance will replace Potential Prospects as the metric by which all will be measured. During the dot.com bust, it happened overnight. In the blink of an eye, Aspirational Happy Talk became verboten, replaced by hard-nosed demands to "show me the money."
Quill
One of the most insightful, real-talk posts I've read on the subject in a while. Huge props to you sir. Whether any 'hivelanders' understand your points and act accordingly remains to be seen. In my experience, they'll just stubbornly argue against it. , but hopefully minds have opened and attitudes have changed since. :) 🙏
Thanks Mate.
The post was getting pretty long so I cut out a number of things I'd intended to put in. One was an admonishment by Napoleon of his generals. When reviewing their plans for deploying troops to protect France's borders from rapidly approaching armies, he quipped [paraphrasing], "Who are you trying to stop, smugglers?"
Not knowing where the enemy would strike, his generals had planned to disburse French forces along the length of the border. Such "de-concentration of force," however, would guarantee that no matter where they struck, there would be an insufficient counter-force to repel them.
As I've frequently written, the Achilles Heel of "decentralization" (cryptos and their dApps) is a seeming inability to "focus force," thereby achieving "critical mass." The result is a myriad of projects that "don't work" instead of a handful that do.
What separates Innovators & Early Adopters from the Mainstream (upon which all else depends) is the desire to prove a point: that "The Dream" is not a fantasy. The Mainstream couldn't give a shit about elevating ideology ... they only care about whether a thing works and whether it's easy to use. The "True Believers," though, will have none of it. Not only does one have to agree with their end goals, one has to agree with how to get there.
"We're not in it for the money," exclaim the holier-than-thou and soon-to-be-crucified martyrs (as they nevertheless do everything within their power to increase the size of their wallets).
Well, I hope they mean what they say for it has been my experience that those unwilling to "fight to win," are well on their way to losing.
Quill
Yes, the Napoleon story is a good example of people's (unfortunately common) tendency to spread themselves thin or attempt to tackle 'too many' things at once.
I've never bought-in to the 'decentralization' narrative. Like, sure, I like some decentralization, and I see it's benefits, but the issue is deeper than that.
Centralization is great and responsible for many of the things people take for granted everyday. I don't see an iPhone being developed by a rag-tag community, but I do see it being developed by a visionary leader.
Great point, totally agreed, and I've said the same here many times.
Hah, yep.
Spot on.
Wishing you a great day.
P.S. I'm no stranger to long posts (I've broken hive's character-limit many times), lol. 🙏
I just read your linked articles. I couldn't agree more.
BTW, I see you're a fellow Canuck. Although I live in Florida, I'm originally from Halifax.
Well met.
Quill
I'm glad my articles resonated. We have so much in common it seems. Interestingly my partner is from Florida, but moved to Toronto a few years ago, lol. Well met! 🙏
Hey, Quill
Glad to see you around again. As usual, great points and equally great debate. I may come back and weigh in - things are pretty, well, umm...busy...
But, I thought you might find these observations of interest in relation to yours.
The point that is being made about Splinterlands is well made. I am part of an onboarding team and at the moment, we see around 80 first posts (not introductions). My unscientific analysis from having done this once a week for about 8 months, is that only 5%, if that will blog. The rest are gamers and the majority are Splinterlanders, SoMe and Axie.
Bloggers and "creatives" - NFTs - remain a mystery to me, will, as @tarazkp suggests, will be the face, but much, much more lies behind.
Finally, and again unscientifically, that the Hive is heading for its third anniversary in its current iteration and 6th if one considers its roots, bears thinking about.
Oh, and as a last word, the Hive is, by and large, a much kinder space than its former self.
Thoughts at 6am before life...
I dropped in on Thanksgiving to say Hi to some old friends and decided to publish a few posts while looking around to see if anything had changed. Earlier today I came across an admonition from "an authority figure" warning people against "buying or selling votes." Two years ago this same fellow was in my comment sections railing on about why bidbots couldn't, and shouldn't, be banned. So, the bidbots are gone ... but the BS remains.
This recent price spike has boosted confidence levels ... but I wonder if that's a good thing. Hive had, and has, structural problems, not least of which is its inability to be strategic. And, unfortunately, the motivation to address that which ails seems to directly coorelate with levels of euphoria/depression. I'm a big picture guy and do what I can to filter out the noise in search of a signal. Although I don't want to pre-judge, I'm struggling to see a path forward for Hive. Things are not as they were. As I wrote in my article, The Great Powers are forming and their marketing budgets (much of which are being directed at Hive's core business) are substantially more than Hive's entire market cap.
Anyway, I've sponsored a marketing contest to see if coelescing strategic initiatives is any easier now than before. I hope to be surprised.
BTW, are you still in touch with Jaynie? If so, say Hi to her for me. I miss you guys.
Quill
I think there will always be BS. It's one of the problems of decentralisation, free speech, etc. on which we have both opined before. I think that some of the bid bot peeps have seen the error of their ways and have changed their MO - they've seen the benefit.
The decentralisation is what will always hamper Hive as it moves forward as an entity and part of it is the schisms between the devs, the marketers, the gamers and the also rans. IMHO. As a total lay person (and also ran) in these matters.
Ha! Glad to see I bring out the best in you! 😂
You make a lot of good points above, especially about this @chillfire bloke leveraging Hive in a unique way to promote his NFTs.
However I will say one thing, and I've said this to you before when I came back from Steemfest 3, Hive is not just the blogging site and your early comments made me realise you haven't quite got it yet.
Sure, those are valid points regarding the 14,000 users on Hive being tiny compared to the communities of the big chains. However did you realise that Splinterlands has over 300,000 users? That's massive, and that game is on the Hive blockchain, meaning there are 300,000 extra users you didn't account for.
Also Splinterlands is a trading card type game, and it could be argued that it was the first NFT game. As you're aware the first-to-market tag can be extremely valuable. As well as the 300k + users, I met a guy on here the other day who said he streamed Splinterlands on Twitch, and not only that, there are a whole bunch of people streaming on there.
Why is this news huge? Because Twitch is a popular platform (doubled in size in the past year) and people enjoy watching people stream games. I'm sure you won't be surprised that many people who watch these games don't actually play them, but get into playing them from watching these streamers. In fact the guy I met on here said that he got into Splinterlands because of watching another stream.
All of this means more eyeballs and more attention on the Hive Blockchain. Splinterlands owner @aggroed was very clever early on, and he made sure other cryptos could be used to purchase cards, so not everyone uses Hive on Splinterlands.
This though can be seen as a bonus, because it means people from other chains are spending time playing a game on the Hive chain.
At the end of the day I get it, you're old fashioned like me. Hive, previously Steemit, for us represented the coin, they are one and the same. People used to tell me back in those days when I complained about the quality of the site and the lack of marketing, that it was not all about the site and I shouldn't get so hung up on it.
I didn't really get them until Steemfest 3 and now it's abundantly clear to me that the success of Hive as a blogging site is independent to the success of the coin.
All of that being said though, I would like to see a lot of changes to the site. I think so much can be done to improve the look and feel of it. But none of that stops me from being optimistic about the future of the Hive Blockchain.
Cg
PS think I downvoted this post by accident, sorry about that, changed now :)
Cg
Wayne Gretsky (the "Great Gretsky") was once asked what made him "Great." Everyone in the NHL is, by definition, a phenomenal hockey player, and so, differences in technical skills (skating, passing and shooting) could have, at best, minimal consequence.
Gretsky's response was telling:
Forget the past. Where is all this going?
As I opined in my article, the CryptoSphere is undergoing a seachange. As capital and audiences are being concentrated, Great Powers are being formed and each is carving out its own Sphere on Influence in the Great Game.
Many crypto enthusiasts don't want to acknowledge this dynamic. They dream of a decentralized CryptoSphere comprised of thosuands of independent communities each doing their own thing and eeking out an existence in their own little corners of the world. But, as I've argued for years, the advantages of "force concentration" are so great that they cannot be overcome by philosophical aspirations. Simply, it doesn't matter if Achilles himself is driving the chariot, he's going to lose if he encounters a tank.
Crypto.com recently dropped $700 million (more than Hive's entire market cap) to buy the naming rights of the stadium in which the LA Lakers play. Mattt Damon promotes them in a video worthy of an Oscar.
.
.
FTX has signed Tom Brady (football), Stephen Curry (basketball) and Shohei Ohtani (baseball) as celebrity endorsers ... while buying the naming rights of the stadium where the Miami Heat play and producing a very expensive SuperBowl commerical to be run early next year ... which will be viewed by 100 million+ inebriated (and therefore extremely suggestible) people.
.
.
While all this is transpiring, I can't even get Hive whales to sponsor a no-cost contest for Splinterlands:
https://ecency.com/lovinghive/@quillfire/song-contest-rocking-out-the-loot-in-splinterlands
.
Most fundamentally, The Great Game will be about winning the hearts and minds of the mainstream ... without which nothing else will matter. Crypt, if this was a boxing match, who would you bet on?
There are certain online endeavors that are EXTREMELY conducive/vulnerable to Network Effects: amongst them are financial & asset exchanges (including NFTs); social media platforms; and gaming. All are subject to the old aphorism, "The more the merrier."
This fact will result in the Pareto Principle on steroids.
While I'd love to see Splinterlands explode, its 300,000 players pale by comparison to the participation in non-crypto based games such as World of Warcraft. And here's the thing: ALL its non-crypto competitors are rushing to include cryptos and NFTs in their games. We are defined by that which makes us different ... on its current trajectory, what will make Splinterlands, or Hive, unique in 12 months?
The blockchains that will survive will have to:
Be EXCELLENT as something of consequence; and
Align their interests with at least one of the Great Powers such that the success of the latter incidentally results in the succes of the former.
Quill