Looks like I'm up $4000 on paper today.
Yep, we are seeing some green, and I can't help but wonder if September 11th, of all days, will be the one to mark the local bottom of not only this month but also of the entire summertime rally. Of course also lurking in the back of my head are the fun little astrology markers I've been rolling the bones with. Most planets are in retrograde right now and today a new moon. Could be a classic new-moon pump before dump... which certainly would fit in with the timelines I've been betting on.
Zooming out over the last year.
We can see that 9/11 very clearly looks like a double-bottom and is shaped exactly like the last dip to $25k that happened in June 14th right before the summer rally began. Could we be about to rocket upward just like we did back then? Somehow I very much doubt it, and I rather expect that even if 9/11 did mark the low we will still very much be sideways from here (meaning price will maintain the $25k-$30k crab).
I've learned my lesson enough times in the trading game to know I just need to stick to the plan and ignore the noise. Still waiting to the end of the month before going all in on crypto once again, as is my standard. Perhaps it's a bad standard to have considering the risk, but it seems to have somewhat worked thus far. Although it's hard not to imagine how it could have been better, as it could of always been better no matter how well we play the game. Best not to dwell on it too much, but also bad to not dwell on it at all. Dwell.
I've heard that Voice is winding down operations.
Is anyone really surprised? Who'd of thought that a KYC one-person-one vote project would fail. Durp. In retrospect it was inevitable, but in the heat of the moment people on this network felt quite threatened by such a thing. It's always good to remember that the devil is in the details. Had Voice actually created a platform that worked it would have been a miracle and probably even would have helped everyone, including Hive. Competition between open-source projects is a pretty gigantic misnomer in crypto.
Do Hive users have the tools to succeed?
It's debatable to be sure. I suppose first to answer the question we'd have to ask a series of other questions. How many people on Hive should be professional bloggers or vloggers? That's a pretty niche activity, right? Is it reasonable to expect everyone should be doing the same thing? Certainly there are an infinite number of topics to cover so again there's a lot of debate to be had.
At the end of the day I think it's pretty obvious that Hive, like most crypto networks: the value hasn't even been built yet. So the most important job at the moment is either developing new applications or making sure the current infrastructure is running optimally. Of course that's an even more niche activity than blogging. Those who don't have the right kind of brain for this type of technical work will burn out in record time.
If we're being honest it's actually much harder to generate value within a digital landscape than it is to do so in the real world. Why? Because we all live in the real world, and the economy exists to facilitate what people need and want.
At the same time the industrial revolution has made it very difficult for individuals acting alone to generate value in the real world as well. Used to be someone could be a blacksmith or a baker or a cobbler to generate value. How many blacksmiths or cobblers do you know these days? If someone needs shoes they just buy new shoes; no need to repair them. We've transitioned to a disposable society of mass production in which the easiest way to generate value is to simply work for someone else.
This is the reality for 99% of the population. It's no one's fault really this is just the way it turned out. Perhaps it's even the way it was meant to be and humanity was always destined to travel this path. Still, it seems times are changing and we are quite overdue for new infrastructure that once again decentralizes the means of production.
So what are some more ways in which Hive users could generate value around here? Again it's a very difficult question to answer. Luckily the subjectivity of upvotes is a double-edged sword. Sure, people love to complain when something gets downvoted or low-effort content gets rewarded, but it is also that exact subjectivity that allows us to reward whatever type of activity we want. All we have to do is click a button and the thing gets rewards. There's a certain beauty in that simplicity, even though it's far from perfect.
I would also be remiss if I didn't mention the @hive.fund at this time.
Again, it's very easy to point the finger and claim that this or that thing that got funded was a waste of money and didn't deliver. But alas, it's a very useful and subjective tool that allows things to get funded that would have zero chance of being funded otherwise. That's powerful.
But those are just the usual suspects.
Personally my focus has always been on gaming, so it's difficult to come up with any other ideas outside of this scope. My vision has always been that gamers can and will create a ton of value on Hive. There are two main types of value in this regard: artificial and otherwise.
Artificial value would be something like finding a rare sword in an RPG and selling it to someone else on the auction house. It's artificial because technically that sword could be printed to infinity if that's what the community agreed upon, and the only thing that prevents such things from happening is community consensus to the contrary. It's not like the real world; we can't just wish more physical product into existence. It has to come from somewhere. Digital product is another story and is often theoretically infinite.
However, gamers can create real value as well in the form of content creation. A lot goes into these things. Sprites and graphics are very hard to generate en masse. What about voice acting and storyline? What about world-building and skill-balance? What if such things were tokenized and created by a community that provably owns their creation? It's mechanics like these that can completely change the game, so to speak.
Conclusion
So what will I do now? Ah well I told myself that once my Factorio game had concluded that I'd use that momentum to transition back into JavaScript and relational database work. I am still very much in the grove for automating tasks and programming things to do what I want. Time to take a refresher course on the Hive-API methinks.
While it's easy to get sucked in to day-to-day price action it's always good to look to the horizon and wonder what's coming our way. Crypto is a big deal, and it will only get exponentially bigger over time. It's only a matter of time before our bags reflect such things. Patience, friends.
What it all really comes down to is that people intrinsically want to work for a fair wage. Unfortunately the infrastructure to provide such things simply doesn't exist within the cryptosphere when measuring up the typical user. Hell, working for a fair wage doesn't even exist now in the real world, and we might have to look all the way back to the 1970's to make an argument to the contrary. This is simply a matter of infrastructure. Once it gets built the floodgates will open. Hive is on a very short list of networks that can actually accomplish such things. We have a lot going for us and a lot to look forward to.
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