If you have a better name post below :D

Love Handles is the stand-in name I'm using for the service I described in my last post; a system of creating/buying/selling accounts on the Hive blockchain. I'm sure there's a lot of confusion surrounding the idea as it sounds like an exploitative service, so I'm gonna take this time to clear some stuff up.

Creating an account on Hive isn't like sniping a domain name.

When someone snipes a domain name they are making an extremely longshot bet that paying the small yearly fees are going to pay off big even though they don't actually plan on creating anything for said website. You can't do anything with it; it just sits their collecting dust while other people out in the world might want to use it but can't.

What I'm going for here is pretty much the exact opposite of that. I want to facilitate a simple interface that allows anyone to get the account they want without dead accounts going derelict and being lost to the void forever.

Seriously, go check Twitter.

Twitter has some really great search functionality that shows us how bad this problem this really is on every single Web2 app. Seriously, type in any @screenname on Twitter. It was created in 2008 or 2009 and that account is dead. Here I'll think of some random ones right now and check myself.

• @silverbullet Dead account on Twitter. Created July 2007 with one Tweet: "Just setting up my Twitter. #myfirstTweet" which weirdly enough was Tweeted in 2014. This account is also dead on Steem and Hive; created in 2017 (as always).
• @buttercup Account suspended on Twitter; no information. Account derelict on Hive, created in 2016 (nice!) Zero posts, one comment, possible flagwar bot.
• @applepie Active account on Twitter; dead account on Hive.
• @twoplustwo Dead Twitter account created 2007. Dead account on Hive created May 2020 (surprising).
• @lotus (Twitter account suspended; derelict on Hive)
• @highlander (dead 2007; dead on Hive 2016)

See where this is going?

All the names that people want are taken. Once they are taken, they never get recycled back into the ecosystem for users that actually want them. As soon as a social media platform becomes popular, every cool tag gets taken and 99% of them go inactive.

Twitter went online in 2006 but all the names didn't get taken till 2009 when an obvious massive wave hit them like a ton of bricks. Such a tidal wave is coming for Hive during the next mega-bull run, I guarantee it. And again in 2025 most likely (even worse than 2021).

This is a problem.

And it's an even bigger problem for crypto networks, because unlike centralized services, these accounts have to be stored in memory on every node until the end of time on potentially thousands of nodes. That's a lot of wasted space and unutilized value.

Not only that, there are theoretically x1000 times more things a Hive account can do than a social media account can do. A Hive account can store value and access every single dapp connected to the network using the associated credentials. At some point the Hive network may fall into the background like Linux and people won't even know what Hive is, just like they don't know what Linux is or that they use it everyday.

We need to stop being reactive

Many networks just wait for things to go wrong and then they fix them afterward. It's a very frustrating way to do business when you can see the problem coming a mile away. We need to be proactive and hit the ground running. Of course being proactive runs the risk of solving a problem that doesn't exist and wasting a bunch of time. We must be self-aware. Intuition isn't always a valuable resource. Just ask a conspiracy theorist.

Like I mentioned before, this isn't a service the network needs until we have a massive new wave of users. However, by the time that rolls around it might be too late as accounts may start going inactive and getting lost to the aether once again. Truth be told, this service probably isn't going to have any demand until 5 years from now when we are much closer to mainstream adoption during the mega-bubble after next. I'd just like to get these thoughts out there now for future reference.

Literally no one wants to design something of this nature... it's a boring project for boring people :D

That being said it's still worth noting how I envision such a thing. It's also important to note that the only reason I started thinking about this service is because it is NFT word-related like one of my other projects, and there would be some module overlap and the possibility of recycling some code.

The process begins with account recovery.

When anyone creates an account on Hive, the recovery account is automatically set to the entity that created it. It takes 30 days to change the recovery. Theoretically, during those 30 days, the original entity that created said account could steal it back using the account recovery procedures because they are in control of the old Owner Key in addition to being the recovery account (Active Key required).

This 30 day grace-period can be avoided if the recovery account (account creator) never knew the Owner Key to begin with. I assume this is how frontends like Peakd operate. Peakd never stores these keys and they are generated locally on your computer to avoid security compromise. If the account creator never knows the private keys and they are only given the public keys (all that's needed to create the account) then they can not recover the account by themselves and would need the help of the person who controlled the Owner Key.

The problem with a service like Love Handles is that it likely has to be pretty centralized before it can become decentralized (if ever). This means hosting an online database with an API that's storing thousands of private keys... doesn't that sound like an absolute security nightmare? It doesn't sound too great until we realize that 99.9% of these accounts are extremely low/zero value accounts and that there would be procedures and warnings in place to ensure that anyone who deposited large sums into their account needs to immediately change their passwords and learn about self-hosting their own wallet.

Account Ownership

Not your keys? Not your crypto! The person who has access to the Owner Key is the person who owns the account... assuming that the recovery account and someone in control of the old Owner key don't conspire to steal the account. I have big plans for one day creating an air-gapped hardware wallet using Raspberry-Pi tech. #dreambig

In any case...

Anyone would be able to submit accounts to be sold on Love Handles. The first step would be changing the recovery account to one that the service trusts. Perhaps controlled by the service itself; perhaps not depending on allies acquired along the way. At some point the owner key needs to be transferred as well, but the logistics of that have a lot of options.

Regardless, once Love Handles is confident it controls an account, it can be sold to the market on credit as described in my last post. The owner key will not be relinquished to the buyer until the account is paid off, and powerdowns will not be allowed. Disabling the active key is also an option when considering token inflation that may not get locked in a contract like HP inflation. The options regarding the permission system are quite endless when dealing with a centralized system.

Search functionality

So if new users are showing up to lovehandles.io or whatever it's called, how are they going to find an account they actually want? This is actually where the idea started for me, because my Cards Against Humanity clone has the same problem. There needs to be a searchable database that returns useful information back to the end-user.

So maybe the person wants a username with the word "dragon" in it so they type it into the search bar and get back a list of accounts for sale with the given word. It's so surprise that the @dragon account on Hive was taken June 2016, three months after Steem was launched. Of course the account was taken by someone who never used it. With this service online, it's possible that the person controlling these keys realizes they can sell the account for $10 or $20 or more and this account gets recycled back into the ecosystem.

Hive accounts as NFTs

In fact, even I would be willing to buy the @dragon account for $10. Why? Because I know damn well someone will pay like $100 for it at some point in the future. Hive accounts are NFTs, as described in my last post. This means speculation will occur like this just with any other cryptocurrency.

This is another reason why creating Hive accounts is nothing like domain name sniping. With domain name sniping, you expect to take 1000 domains and hope for that one big score. With Hive accounts, they could be sold and resold multiple times, being constantly recycled back into the ecosystem over the coming decades depending on supply/demand and activity. So I could sell an account for $5 but then that person turns around and sells it for $100 a few years later. You never know.

Again, this service will greatly reduce bloat on the Hive blockchain, because unlike blog posts, account names and passwords are something you can't skimp on. Theoretically in ten years Hive may choose to archive old blog posts so that lighter nodes can run with less burdens attached to them, but the same can never be said for accounts. Account info must be available at all times on every node indefinitely until the end of time.

Can you imagine what it would be like to store 100M accounts in your tiny little Hive node... 99% of them being dead accounts? Yeah, pretty annoying... and expensive too. RAM costs money. SSDs also cost money, and they are much slower than RAM. Wouldn't it be nice if we never had 100M accounts because they were being recycled? Probably. Assuming we don't scale any higher than that.

Datamining

It would also be trivially easy to use this frontend to link email addresses and phone numbers to accounts.

The obvious disadvantage of this is privacy, hacking, and data breaches like we saw recently with Ledger. What an absolute nightmare! 250k people had their addresses and phone numbers doxed. Threats of death and kidnapping were not uncommon, and IIRC at least one actual kidnapping did occur. Fun stuff.

The advantage of such a service is that anyone would be able to get text or email alerts regarding the status of their account. Powerdown started? Send out an email. Owner key or recovery account changed? Send out a text alert. Honestly I'm surprised such a service doesn't exist yet or at least has zero popularity. I guess the homesteading libertarians on Hive value their privacy, but that will not be the case when mainstream adoption rolls around.

Rewards for providing data

Unlike Web2 that takes your information and gives nothing in return except access to a "free" account. Web3 can provide infinite incentives for the same information. In the case of Hive, Resource Credits are going to be pretty valuable when our limited bandwidth gets stress-tested.

Users who provide two-factor authorization methods like email address and phone numbers could be rewarded with delegations in terms of RC credits or even raw HivePower. This information could even be used to implement the traditional account recovery that Web2 users are used to.

Proof-of-brain

There is a small opportunity here to showcase a proof-of-brain use case in this arena. Imagine we are in the middle of a mega-bubble and millions of users are being onboarded. Do we really want to see names like @bob12345 running around? Barf.

Rather than that, those on Hive who are good at coming up with screen names would be incentivized to do so through this system. One person can think of a thousand screen names, and even if they don't have the tokens to claim the names they could get a sponsor that actually has the tokens (whale XYZ) to split ownership of the account with them.

So say some random Hive user comes up with some good ideas for account names. They get this sponsor to approve some of them, and now they both jointly own the accounts (say 50/50) so when the accounts gets sold on Love Handles the profits are divided between both owners.

This is good for token holders, proof-of-brain busy-bees, and the network at large. It's also good for Love Handles if 'they' are doing something sneaky like taking a 10% fee off the top of every transaction because their is no competition. Food for thought.

Conclusion

Yeah it's a stupid idea that solves a problem that theoretically doesn't exist (yet). They can't all be winners, kids. Truth be told there are about a dozen other way cooler projects I'd rather complete, but considering how early in the game we are, many devs will be forced into busywork infrastructure just to get the network fully functioning and frictionless.

So why did I claim all these accounts? To exploit the network? Hardly. I just don't want to see another wave of accounts fall into obscurity like they do on literally every other social networking site (including this one). Hive accounts are NFTs. They have value and they are taking up space inside a very inefficient database being copied and verified all over the world. Anything we do to lessen the bloat will be an absolutely imperative priority going forward.

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