RE: Will Hive stay a niche blockchain & cryptocurrency?

Fair enough :) The way I wrote my previous comment, may have driven you to write the comment above. But what you mentioned in your second, and last sentence, is exactly what will not drive the HIVE ecosystem. Yes, its a free market, but HIVE and HIVE eco-system is soooo small, it'll get nowhere when we see all sort of projects launching that do not get the right focus and attention, from day one, whilst it also competes with one another.

I had a quick peak at your project as well. I'll not make critical notes, since I don't want to get the same feedback again :) I do hope your project will get somewhere. You realise the 15+ inch laptop you are selling can be purchased from AliExpress for a fraction of the costs to the ones in your webshop? Or do I miss understand something?

Wish you all the success with your project/company.

I appreciate what you try to do. We indeed need services where we can circulate money, which is in fact: 1) method of earning 2) method of spending. The earning part we have, at least the native blockchain possibilities. The spending part requires any form of marketplace.

This comment became much larger then I expected. I'm gonna share my experiences with you around marketplaces.

I personally investigated a Dutch variant of Craiglist a few years ago; I thought I could take their model and add a direct payment model to it with an escrow account where the buyers pays into and the seller gets the funds after a set amount of days when no dispute is raised; This to allow the buyer to receive the goods and check if everything is ok with the goods. When goods not arriving, or in a different state than agreed upon during the sales phase, the buyer can request to get the funds back. The escrow account is a kinda mediator. When implemented fully automatically, its gonna be quite hard to handle disputs that are not resolved between buyer and seller, therefore I believe such model requires humans involved to handle these disputs. One of the main reasons of such escrow account, is to prevent scammers: selling goods, but never sending them.

That said, when I investigated this, created a kinda business plan for a new startup company, I realised the risks for success are too high: 1) the Dutch Craiglist already existed before Google launched; Even before the first WWW search engines where available, everyone in Netherlands knows this services and many use them 2) Dutch Craiglist could relatively easy implement such feature themselves, its not innovative, its just an extension to the set of services by the company and requires a 'dispute mediation' department. A few years later, risk 2) materialised. Fortunately I didnt spend all my time, energy and at least a few (to more) million Euro's in this idea.

That said, a subset of Craiglist could be interesting for a new service; A service with a much ebtter frontend, UX design and additional features making the user experience and the user journey something great for the user. Am talking about second hand books, music media and games. Key to such service is user experience, user experience and again user experience, as with any service that is setup for success. The problem with the books is the market: more the older generation then the young. Music may still be possible today, but probably becoming more and more niche. Games: I think that's a tick in the box. The next challenge is to become a service people know how to find and like to use. Thats where user experience comes into play, where look and feel plays a super important role, where simplicity is crucial, where the layout of the service shall be 1) functional 2) intuitive 3) super easy to use and 4) clean and attractive. Next to all of that, a lot of effort (time) and money (promotion costs) is required to market the service.

When having all of that, more needs to be added the the service. Publishing tools, Bulk uploads, Integration with other Web frontends and more. All the relevant stuff the popular marketplaces are having, better implemented, with more features and some to more unique use case.

And when having all of that, one needs to be ready to scale the service. When for whatever reason the usage increases a lot in a short time, the service shall keep on running stable. Nothing is more killing for a service when it starts to show instabilities, which usually happens when load is put onto the service. I realise, at first one concentrates on building the features, the look/feel etc etc, and only when we've done that, we come to some critical point in usage growth, we need to be ready to re-develop the whole service again, from the ground up with reliability, stability, scalability, and security build into the framework. From years of personal experience of dealing with high volume, highly reliable and stable software development, about 80 to 95% of the time spend in development has nothing to do with writing code. In worst case only 5% of the time is spend in writing code, and best case somewhere up to 20% (may depend on type of service, and market segment with associated requirements). A marketplace deals with consumers, which may require quite a bit of governance to implement and follow the countries rules in which is operated. One can say: We are de-centralised, so we dont fall under the rules of a country, region, or whatever. I know these arguments from so many people in crypto space. However the reality will be the service is gonna stay niche, used by those who dont believe in governments and its laws, with a few exceptions here and there.

Some time ago I read about Aussie Digital (https://www.aussiedigital.io/). They are coming up with, or already have a whole set of services. Particl promised years ago to do kinda the same. I came across a few others, but cant find them anymore (forgot the names to be honest).

Now am not saying anything against trying to create something for the HIVE ecosystem. Every time spend and effort put into the HIVE ecosystem is good. We need examples to show others what HIVE can do for them. That said, I think any marketplace shall be independent from token point of view, but shall allow all crypto (and fiat) currencies to be used. MOst people in this world are living in the old world, but are all potential users of platforms build for the new world. Therefore these platforms need to be a bridge, developed and as much as possible operated in the new world, but allowing the old world to make use of the platform/services... that is key imho. Anybody who have similar views are people I like to talk with to see if we can join hands and make something happen. I do believe very much in a team approach to bring a new service to market, everybody with their own skills and next to that an almost endless amount of energy to fight all the battles along the road to success and maximum passion for the project (well, startup company) :)

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thelogicaldude (74) 4 years ago

I am aware, they are one of my product sources. Allot of people markup Aliexpress items even more that I have. Dropshipping is a widely used business model. Aliexpress doesn't accept cryptocurrencies though. The whole issue is we are trying to build use case for the currency, to actually use it for its initial intended use, which is in peer to peer trade and commerce. I am focused more on building the digital download products at this point on the store. The initial part of the project was to build the classifieds site as a sort of Craigslist marketplace for the Hive blockchain. The store came later as a way to try and pay back the investment I have made in trying to build a community for everyone. Sorry if you took my comment the wrong way. I was just stating a fact. I personally have no problem with feedback, but you asked a question of if it was my project, and before I could respond, you went in with your 'feedback'. That project was not mine, so I made the statement I made. Sometimes, feedback is not always requested though, so you should wait for the best time to give it.

$0.04

1 vote

edje (72) 4 years ago

$0.06