It's been a while since my last post...
And I assure you all, dear readers, that I am thoroughly annoyed by my seemingly lack of time management! To be fair this seems to happen every time the holidays roll around. It always feels like I should have plenty of time to sit down and write something, and yet the days tick by and a huge gap of forged within my timeline.
The biggest issue seems to be the complete absence of a normal setup and routine. It's very easy to get work done when I'm home alone with my cat and it's quiet and I can do whatever. Outside of that environment is a world of constant distraction. It certainly doesn't help that I hate writing these things on a laptop. Not a fan. My shoulder injury agrees.
But sometimes you just gotta work with whatcha got.
Obviously crypto itself is in very much of a holding pattern until this ETF nonsense gets sorted out. I'm still pretty unconvinced that it matters in the mid term. Crypto's gonna do what crypto's gonna do. Real fundamental gains take at least a year to materialize, so the only real changes are the short-term knee-jerk reactions vs the actual long term infrastructure that gets built out.
It's funny to see so much pushback.
There seems to be two camps of ideology in this regard. The first camp is filled with the greed monsters that only care about number go up. This is the bigger camp for sure. The vast majority of people (even rich ones) live within a scarcity mindset in which they never have enough resources no matter how many they currently have. It could always be more.
The other camp is full of idealists who see institutions and things like ETFs and impending derivatives as a threat. They speak as if we have some kind of choice in the matter. The foundation of crypto is to create open, inclusive, and connected networks. Those who have decided that the establishment is the enemy seem to have it in their heads that these types of entities shouldn't be allowed to use crypto. Well, how would that work, exactly? It's an absurd and thoughtless notion.
At the end of the day disruption doesn't mean destruction.
When a new technology comes out that's superior to the old technology, everybody has their choice to make. Nobody is stopping the guy selling horses from pivoting to being a car salesman. At the same time, the chance of that actually happening seems to be quite low. A change like that is too big and awkward for many to accept.
The legal battle brewing between crypto and the banks is just getting started. Spoiler alert: crypto wins. We obviously don't win all the battles but the war is already decided. We've already entered the "if you can't beat them, join them" phase of the game. The snowball will escalate from there.
Time is the great equalizer
We are gliding through a point of history in which most people very much believe that crypto is a scam, and if not a scam then at least they have many questions and don't understand the value proposition. Then we have to factor in propaganda into the mix like, "it wastes energy" to get an even clearer picture of the situation.
There are millions of developers out there that still don't get why crypto is important or even relevant at this point. That's how early we are in the game. Show me the Linux distribution that gets funded by crypto. It doesn't exist. Not only does it not exist those old school devs seem to think the way to go is still to sell data or operate via donation. This will seem completely archaic in a decade or two. The tech simply hasn't caught up to the potential applications.
Sidewalks were made for walking
They were not required until we had paved roads and cars driving on them. Skateboards were the random result of this infrastructure existing. We could have never planned for the skateboard to exist; it was just one of those things that happened as a result of a rapidly evolving environment.
Crypto is a lot like that...
But we haven't built the sidewalks yet. Hell, the cars themselves are extremely janky and the roads are either virtually non-existent or controlled by the competition. We truly haven't the slightest clue what's going to happen in such a rapidly changing environment. Don't forget your popcorn.
What's up with Hive?
Our own network is no stranger to this concept of focusing on price vs what we can actually get done. As we continue our crabwalk and slide on the market cap ranks to #300 it can get pretty discouraging. Many have decided we must be doing something wrong and need to make drastic make or break changes to the platform. Shame that many seem to ignore the potential "break" part of that equation.
Personally I think it's shocking that Hive doesn't even use all its bandwidth even though operation fees are free™. It's quite the paradox. On one hand it's a signal that everything is working and everyone on the network has as much blockspace as they could possibly desire, and on that other hand it heavily implies that the demand to use our chain isn't high enough.
How can we increase demand to use our chain?
Here are two really bad ideas floating around lately:
- Lower HBD yield rates
- Remove the reward pool
Take a look at those ideas and ask yourself how either of those things could possibly increase the demand to use the chain. It should be obvious that the exact opposite would happen. These are small ideas that assume we will always be small and we have to continue cutting costs to avoid a death-spiral of unsustainability. The problem here are not the ideas themselves, but the logic that they were born from. They are inconsistent. "Let's grow the chain by cutting costs and gutting it." That's not how it works, but I digress.
What can Hive do that other chains can't?
Quite a bit honestly. The problem is that the current environment doesn't seem to value it. Take censorship resistance for example. If you say "censorship resistance" to a random person on the street do they even know what you're talking about? It's not that they disagree that censorship resistance is important or not, it's that they aren't even educated enough to engage in the discussion in the first place.
How many people even get banned from social media?
1%? Less? So the total pool of users we have to work with that understand the problem is less than 1% of WEB2? And of those less than 1% of users that got banned how many of those do we actually want on our network. Meaning: how many of them were banned for a damn good reason and we should want nothing to do with them? This is a debatable and politically charged conversation, but the answer is certainly a non-zero number. So not only is it a small subset, but rather a subset of the subset: the ones who got 'wrongfully' banned. Which again is up for debate and determined through consensus and downvotes and whathaveyou.
The missing template issue
My ultimate conclusion regarding this issue is that at some point there simply will not be enough bandwidth to go around because cross-platform solutions will be created that gobble up extra resources. Consider something like an on-chain game that has millions of players. Might not matter where the data is stored, only that it is stored somewhere. So again it might all just come down to being a waiting game of collaboration and organization of infrastructure.
Conclusion
Ah well this was a weird one. Perhaps I'm already out of practice. Crypto may be in a holding pattern at the moment, but we always trend toward a slowly then all at once type of environment. Volatility is our friend whether we like it or not.
At some point censorship resistance is going to matter a lot more than it does today. We can see this happening in real time. What good is a network that gets captured by the very institutions we were working to disrupt? Regulators are going to corrupt a lot of platforms going forward and force a lot of users to seek out other options. At least that's the theory.
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