Case for Decentralization and why Hive matters?

Decentralization is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. wikipedia

That is how Wikipedia defines decentralization. If you google the word you may even find definition that don't really represent what decentralization represents today. When talking about decentralization two names come to my mind Satoshi Nakomoto - creator of Bitcoin and Rod Beckstrom - an author of The Starfish and the Spider and a founder Beckstrom's Law.

Of course there were other who talked and contemplated about the concept of decentralization and its benefits before these two folks. Satoshi's Bitcoin came at the right place and the right time to gain traction and attention of people. Bitcoin is a brilliant idea and implementation for the alternative financial system that challenges the global financial status quo. For it to become a global phenomenon it was important to have right conditions and be presented at the right time.

As Rod Beckstrom states in his book - "Decentralization is not a new concept, it has just been dormant for many years. Creation of the internet unleashed its force.' Rod wrote and shared his ideas on decentralization even before Satoshi did about Bitcoin. Established internet infrastructure and connection among people globally made Bitcoin possible. Not only the widespread phenomenon of internet but also massive failure of global financial system caused people to pay attention to the alternative solution. These two combine Bitcoin has become a global movement for change. A change for better financial system. At the very least preservation of wealth.

So what does Bitcoin offer and what is its value proposition? If offers people an alternative to the traditional financial system. Traditional financial systems rely on banks to process transactions, store wealth, and provide various financial services. This process is powered by Central Bank policies, their fiat currency, and laws of the land that grant massive authority to Central Banks over monetary policies.

Bitcoins has revealed to masses the corrupt nature of the fiat currencies and monetary policies instituted by Central Banks and governments. It has demonstrated that trust put into these institutions by the participants of these economies was misused in form inflations and other policies that diluted peoples wealth. In short these policies served and still serve the few in power at the cost of ordinary participants of these economies.

What Bitcoin offers is a removal of trust from centralized entities to a programmable code and decentralized network where not a single entity can single-handedly make monetary decisions on behalf of all participants. This in return transfers trust from entities to code that can't be corrupt as long as decentralized system is in place.

Remember the internet woke up decentralization by connect us all globally and providing technologies to move away from centralized systems and trust? While internet inspired innovation and competition, it has also brought forward tendencies to monopolize services. While internet's nature is decentralized, brilliant corporate minds figured out ways to monopolize and centralize the internet. Amazon dominates e-commerce; Google dominates search, video sharing, mobile phones, etc; Facebook & Twitter dominate social media; Apple dominates mobile phones and apps built on them.

One common thing these monopolies share is that they make money off people's creativities. The art, videos, knowledge, social interactions, and other content they create and share on their platform. Not only they exploit people's talents and social interaction but also they monetize on their digital footprints by packaging the eyeballs and selling to the advertisers. Occasionally they even go further violating people's privacy.

In a free market nothing wrong with innovating and profiting from innovations, providing services people need and like to use. Just like Central Banks and governments these services may prove to be useful. However when too much power is concentrated and centralized, these entities have a tendency to take actions that do not necessarily benefit the participants of these economies and end up causing harm rather that serving.

For these reasons decentralized solutions will play a vital role as competition and an alternative to traditional monopolized systems. This is why Hive matters. Hive has proven to be a decentralized platform that is innovating when it comes to web, social media, games, and dApps. Just like Bitcoin offers an alternative to traditional financial and banking systems, Hive offers an alternative to web technologies in form of social media, games, dApps, and anything people can think of.

Hive has a solid technology that provides a secure and easy to use wallet powered by decentralized blockchain. Decentralization is super important when it comes to keeping wallets secure. Not only it provides security and ownership of ones wallet but also transfers responsibility to keep it safe. The wallet holder is the sole responsible party to keeping keys secure.

Hive and its history has proven to provide vital data how decentralized system should operate to stay secure and withstand potential attacks. I don't like talking much about Steem Hostile Takeover, but this story does serve as an example why Hive is truly decentralized.

At the same time it is important to understand that true decentralization is a goal, not a state. It oscillates between points of centralized and decentralized. Steem has proven to be fragile and to be easily centralized due to the fraud by the founders who ended up holding significantly large amounts of stake under the control of Steemit Inc. However, even their stake wasn't enough to centralize Steem. It was the exchanges who used user stakes to centralize the blockchain. Anyway, that is in the history books and probably a topic for another time. Yet a important point to demonstrate how decentralized Hive is and immune to potential hostile takeovers.

Hive matters in the space to decentralized web, because it provides working solutions no other project comes even close to address. Decentralization has been come a marketing word that anybody throws them around to attract people to their projects. Even scammers use it with zero substance to back their claims. Hive has always been true to this claim and direction it is going.

Challenges Hive faces is the lack of understanding what the value proposition is. Not only for the ones outside of this economy, but also the ones who are within don't have a full grasp of the potential to change the web.

It has always been time for participants of Hive economy to take long term investment return position versus short term token gains via various reward systems. Any reward systems that Hive provides are short term and do no necessarily translate into long term significant gains that can be shown in the form of price appreciation of the Hive coin. The only real and significant investment return on Hive investment can be through Hive coin increasing in price. While prices are usually at the mercy of speculation, the real use case also matter. Of which Hive can offer in abundance.

In my humble opinion, the only metric that matter ands should matter for Hive as a long term goal should be the user-growth. Not only user growth with onboarding activities, but also actions that improve user retention. For this it will require a collective effort by all Hive stakeholder, users, and participants to focus on this one mission, making this platform user friendly. Because it has a lot to offer to all users of the internet. If we continue to improve in this matter and have greater focus on users, the valuation fo the coin will follow, investors will follow, network offer will follow.

We have something good here. We have something important here. We are the pioneers in decentralization.