Some Thoughts on the Future...

in #hive4 years ago


obligatory thumbnail image, source: pixabay.com

I know it's been WAY too long since I've posted here. For some reason it's really difficult for me to write posts. I very much want to write more, and I've started writing many posts over the past few months, but I end up spending many hours trying to organize and present my thoughts in a clear and understandable way until I inevitably have to stop (because, you know, life happens). Then, when I go back later I don't like what I wrote and scrap the whole thing.

In any case, I'm going to try and be a little less anal critical about my writing so I can actually get some posts out there from time to time, and I apologize in advance if it doesn't turn out well...

Additionally, some people seem to take my lack of posting to mean that I'm not active on the platform, which really couldn't be further from the truth. Hive is pretty much my whole life, at times to an unhealthy degree. In addition to my full time job being based on Hive, I read as many posts as I can, manually curate nearly every day, follow a number of different Hive-related chat groups, talk about and promote Hive to apps, brands, investors, and pretty much anyone who will listen, and just think about the platform and brainstorm ideas constantly.

Which brings me to the reason for my post today. I've been really happy to see all of the discussions going on recently about the future of the Hive blockchain. It's clear that the existing system hasn't worked out the way that most of us had hoped and we seem to finally be at a place where we can evaluate some different options or directions for the platform and try something new.

The Value of HIVE

The most important thing that I think we, as a community, need to figure out, is what the primary use case / value is for the HIVE token. Basically, why would someone want to get some HIVE? (and speculation on price appreciation or anything that boils down to "to earn more HIVE tokens" aren't acceptable answers).

As an example, people might want to get bitcoin if they want an unconfiscatable store of value that they can easily transport or transfer anywhere in the world without any intermediary or requiring anyone's permission. That's a fantastic use case and value for bitcoin (in my opinion - not financial advice), and the people buying bitcoin as an investment are speculating that the demand for that use case will increase over time and that bitcoin will still be the top choice for it.

That's what we need to figure out for HIVE tokens, and then design and build off of that.

I could probably write pages and pages on the merits and drawbacks of various different options for a primary use case for the HIVE token, but in the interest of actually getting this post published I will just briefly touch on a few ways that HIVE is currently being used that seem promising.

Hive as an Immutable Content Store

One clear and simple use case is that having HIVE tokens (powered up as HP) allows you to easily publish text content provably and immutably on the blockchain. While this is a nice thing to have, I don't really think it's the big win that we are all hoping for, so I'm not going to go into it in any more detail. I could be wrong though, so if you think otherwise, let me know in the comments!

Hive as an Advertising Platform

Another use case for the HIVE token is for advertising. There are a number of Hive-based websites with a reasonable amount of traffic (at least from a specific, targetted audience) to which one can get a message out through the use of the HIVE token. It may be through paying for a promoted post spot, buying upvotes, or powering up enough to vote posts up to the front page yourself, but the opportunity is there.

Please note that I'm not necessarily advocating for this. I know as well as anyone all of the issues and abuses that have arisen as a result of these things. But I also think that there is a tremendous amount of potential in a decentralized advertising network if done properly. If we were to really focus on it and work towards addressing the issues it could present a very unique value proposition for the HIVE token.

I believe that this was also close to the initial vision and idea behind Steem when it was first created. The basic concept is that instead of paying a centralized service like Facebook or Twitter to advertise, you pay the token holders (either directly or indirectly) so that everyone shares in the value relative to their holdings.

Again, I could go on and on about this, but I think that's enough for the purposes of this post.

Hive as an Incentivization Platform

This is a pretty cool one which a lot of people, including myself, have used successfully in the past. If you have a significant amount of HP you can use it to incentivize people to do things via your control of a portion of the reward pool. Any time you see a contest or push to do something in return for an upvote, that's an example of using Hive as an incentivization platform.

The problem there is that the incentivization always has to be done through the upvoting of posts, which leads to people making posts or comments that don't really add any value as such just for the purposes of receiving their incentivization upvote. That directly clashes with the entire purpose of the content voting and rewards mechanism which is meant to "crowdsource" the value of posted content through upvoting and downvoting.

I think it would be cool (and please note this is just a half-baked idea) if there was a platform specifically made for this type of incentivization. I think of it as a different kind of Patreon where instead of paying someone money directly every month, you invest in a token and direct your portion of the "reward pool" to them.

Hive as an App Development Platform

This is the big one, and obviously the one that I have been personally most involved with. @blocktrades gives a great writeup about this in the post linked below and I would highly recommend giving that a read if you're at all interested in any of this:

Hive’s future as a 2nd layer blockchain network

There is a ton of potential here, but it's also the path with the most competition, by far. We would be going up against Ethereum, EOS, Cardano, Tron, and probably about 50 more platforms in a constant battle to get developers to choose Hive over everyone else.

The other options have very little to no competition at all and if Hive can pull one of them off well it could much more easily become the leader in its niche. I'm not trying to advocate for one or the other, I'm just trying to present some thoughts and ideas for the community to consider as we think about the future of the Hive blockchain.

Why not go with all of them?

Having everyone focused on making Hive the absolute best at one specific thing will give it a much better chance at being successful than if we have our relatively small community split between many different things (like we have now).

It doesn't mean that people can't still use Hive for other things, but if there is one specific use case that everyone agrees is the primary value driver for the HIVE token, then we can work to excel at that. The core blockchain developers can update the base layer for the needs of the specific use case, other developers can build all of the tools and resources necessary to support the use of the platform on top of the base layer, and the marketers and promoters can all have a clear message to broadcast and audience to target.

Of course, the items listed above are just a few of the use cases for HIVE that I have personally seen used to some degree of success in the past, but it's certainly not all of them. There are likely some awesome use cases that I've missed, or even a completely new idea that we haven't thought of yet. Now is the time to bring them up!

A Quick Anecdote

First, before I get to my story, I will say that I completely failed at my plan (mentioned at the beginning of this post, if you remember back that far) to be less critical about my writing and try to keep this brief. I ended up working on this post for many hours, over many days, with quite a few revisions. I guess you can't teach an old dog new tricks, as the saying goes...

Anyway, back before I joined Steem I used to read a site called Hacker News pretty much all the time. In fact, that's how I learned about Bitcoin back in 2012 and started mining it and then stopped because I'm dumb. In any case, on Hacker News people mostly just post links to interesting articles from other sites and then people can comment on the articles and upvote good comments and earn magic internet points that are worth nothing more than bragging rights.

What I found interesting, though, is that I would often just skim the article, or sometimes skip it entirely, and go right for the comments. Somehow there seemed to be experts on pretty much every relevant topic there that would comment on the articles and they usually provided much more useful and interesting information than the article itself. In particular, the comments were a good gauge on whether or not the article had good info and was worth reading or was BS (as, sadly, so many articles are these days).

In any case, I've always thought it would be awesome if Hive could be like that, and make it so that the people posting those useful comments could actually earn something of value for their time and effort. Unfortunately, so far it seems that adding value to the magic internet points has served to encourage gaming of the system more than anything else, but that doesn't mean it's not worth continuing to try new things to see if we can make it work.

Thank You

Finally, I want to say thank you to everyone who has worked to create the Hive blockchain and make it into the success it has been so far. I really can't wait to see what the future holds and I'm excited to get to be a part of it with all of you!

@yabapmatt

NOTE: All rewards from this post will go to @steem.dao (the Hive Development Fund account) to support the ongoing development of the Hive platform.

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I know it's been WAY too long since I've posted here. For some reason it's really difficult for me to write posts. I very much want to write more, and I've started writing many posts over the past few months, but I end up spending many hours trying to organize and present my thoughts in a clear and understandable way until I inevitably have to stop (because, you know, life happens). Then, when I go back later I don't like what I wrote and scrap the whole thing.

I hate writing, I hate blogging, but when I got on Steem I made a promise to myself to write every day. I've done fairly well at that and by forcing yourself to a commitment and then turning that into a routine breaks a lot of barriers. I also try not to be too critical about what I write, I write what I feel and I express it as I would speak. I do a quick glance over for errors but I leave it at that and wait for a response so I can engage with people who took the time to read it.

Basically, why would someone want to get some HIVE?

I've been talking about this a lot lately and two things I think are important.

  • SMT Release
  • Native Smart Contracts

I see the disaster Gods Unchained has become all from the fact they are on Ethereum. After Gods Unchained did their initial release of first generation cards called Genesis they still had to "activate" these cards as NFT's on the Ethereum blockchain. They said this would take 24-72 hours and would cost over six figures (which they would cover, I'm guessing around $100,000-$150,000).

Shortly after they started they got shutdown by the miners, they were told they were optimizing their transactions too well and putting too many operations in per transaction. The miners said they would no longer process their transactions until they changed how they were doing this. I don't know the final agreement, but I do know it took almost a month to finish the activation and cost a whole lot more (likely more like $500,000).

Combining cards has yet to be released almost a year later, so there is no way to upgrade your cards despite this being promised. There is now finally a way to bulk cards but still very limited and a nightmare to do.

The reason I mention this story is become Hive is an absolute gold mine for games like Gods Unchained and Crypto Kitties, if we implement native smart contracts. The transaction fees is why I am sitting on 32K+ Gods Unchained cards I can't really sell.

What I found interesting, though, is that I would often just skim the article, or sometimes skip it entirely, and go right for the comments.

There is no question the comment section is the most popular section of Reddit by most of the community, it is also where most of the best interactions and meme happen. With Hive we just don't have enough users to make this happen, and most are so focused on rewards only that there is little organic engagement.

Comments are what gets most people to sign up for accounts and be part of a community.

best thing so far for me with buying into gods unchained, is it made me appreciate what we have here, Splinterlands.

You're welcome!

XD

yeah LOL, it was you!

thanks acidyo, :)

With native smart contracts we will really be competing against eth, eos, etc.. we need to differentiate.

This.

None of those have free transactions if I’m correct.

That means that hive is best at tokenizing the smallest kinds of ‘transactions’ on a decentralized way.

Comments are what gets most people to sign up for accounts and be part of a community.

Absolutely. How do you increase spontaneous interaction then? Certainly can't force anyone to comment by choking a rule down their necks. It would defeat the purpose.
Facebook has some kind of badges in Groups, namely "Rising Star", "Visual Storyteller", "Conversation Starter" etc. The system awards these badges to the people who regularly post in the group, initiate discussions.

Maybe something like that can be implemented on hive for comments. NOT for how many comments they have made over a period of time, people will start to spam one-liners—"wow nice thank you" then.
Rather the system can analyze comment threads and replies and re-replies and then associate certain badges besides their usernames, not just on their profiles.

They will keep on interacting for keeping their badges even though they don't have any monetary value and newcomers will see them and will try to attain that social status.

Inducing the feeling of envy is the most successful tool to make any social media grow.

I hear you about GU. I have quite a collection there myself and have been pretty disappointed with what they've done with that project, especially considering the amount of funds they've raised both from the card sales and from investors.

I disagree about wanting native smart contracts on Hive though. How would that be any different than EOS? I agree with what blocktrades said in his post that I linked to that building 2nd layer apps will work much better than a 1st layer smart contract solution, so if Hive is going to go with the app development platform route then that would be the best bet as it's sufficiently differentiated from the tons of native smart contract chains.

Either way though, I still think that getting any level of success for Hive as an app development platform is going to be immensely harder than most people here seem to think. Everyone wants to be on Ethereum, and there are a quickly growing number of Ethereum sidechain solutions popping up every day that offer many of the same advantages as Hive would. For the apps who are ok not using Ethereum, they are looking at platforms like EOS.

As much as I obviously think Hive is the best way to go for app development, if I'm being realistic I don't think we have much chance at competing with those other platforms. I think Hive has a much better chance of success if it picks something more specific and unique where it can be the clear leader.

The best way to accelerate Hive Dapp is more devs need to help each other out with code.

Normally if I ask a specific code question like

"what 5 lines of code do i use for this?"

I get here is a link to the manual, doc, etc..

It would be nice to see people say.
"Here is the 5 lines I use. Would you like me to take 5 mins to look at what you are working on?"

Our team does the later as much as we can.

Too many islands on the dev side.

This is what ETH has over us. They have meetups, Hackathons and a lot of devs sharing code, knowing growth is best.

Wow goods Unchained would kiss Hive with Smart contracts and free transactions :D

Very good info about Gods unchained. I did not know that but am also not surprised. I am a little surprised Hive has not had more people develop over here given the lack of gas fees.

@markymark, Please see my comment below re. this post: https://peakd.com/hive/@atma.love/re-yabapmatt-2020816t1345848z (in case you haven't seen it)
Namaste
Atma

"...most are so focused on rewards only that there is little organic engagement."

I am glad to see you understand how financialization of curation deprecates the actual social function free speech effects. Curation rewards destroy curation.

I hope that someday you undertake to support the far greater value of free speech than mere financial aggrandizement. The future, not only of Hive, but of humanity, actually depends on it.

The truth is that if Hive doesn't, something else will. We can, being early adopters of Hive, benefit from Hive's success, or lose that advantage when Hive is no longer the best mechanism for society to undertake free speech when another platform is.

I value free speech but that doesn't mean it is free from consequences. If you want proof, go up to some biker gang and call them fucking assholes. Let me know how it goes.

It is precisely the consequences of free speech that make it fundamentally necessary to a free society. Free speech is the critical mechanism by which society interacts. No tool is more necessary to society after food, air, water, shelter, and means of security.

Deprecating free speech to a subsidiary position to finance is irrational. It is through our interactions that we transact, and absent free speech, there is no mechanism for financial interaction to be robust and functional.

I know this is difficult for you to understand, but downvotes do not limit free speech.

Not sure why you always try to lecture me about free speech either.

We disagree as to the definition of censorship. I use the established dictionary definition that has long been accepted, and you refuse to agree it is correct.

Characterizing my comments as lectures indicates you prefer to ignore the meaning of my words, which is your prerogative. I continue to engage you despite this, because I know that eventually misunderstanding that generates flawed actions produces harm, and I believe you intend with all your heart to benefit Hive, not harm it.

I thus believe that someday we will agree on the definition of censorship.

@themarkymark performs a valuable service to Hive by that very mechanism of downvoting you disparage. Spam, scams, and plagiarism (a form of scamming) are intolerable absent robust mechanisms to discourage them.

I have frequently and forthrightly discussed with @themarkymark my disagreement with vote selling, censorship, and much else, and despite my incessant and vociferous disagreement with him have not been flagged once to my recollection.

My experience suggests @themarkymark does not flag except in support of free speech by preventing abuse of Hive for profit by spammers and scammers.

Please do not respond to my comments or posts in the future with automated messages. I believe Hive is a vector for social interactions, which bots degrade.

Thanks!

This is an automated bot, it is minimalpris's many alts. he is the one behind upvotebank who has access to and abusing over 500 posting authorties.

https://peakd.com/scam/@themarkymark/over-1-000-posting-authority-are-being-abused-by-upvotebank-and-minimalpris-are-you-on-the-list

Thank you for your hard work, by which you have gained the knowledge you share here.

While this [Immutable Content Store] is a nice thing to have, I don't really think it's the big win that we are all hoping for ...

I think you shouldn't underestimate the impact a well functioning blogging platform would have on the HIVE price.

The value of a (social) network is measured among others by the number of its users.

A rich pool of satisfied users, who were blogging on HIVE and asking their friends and relatives to join, would make HIVE much more interesting for larger investors in the long run than it is today, interesting to place advertisements read by many, to market products, to disseminate information.

How many players would for example enjoy Splinterlands if the HIVE blogging platform (which you can use to advertise your game) wouldn't be as minuscule as it is but consisted of hundred thousands of users?

The value of facebook doesn't originate from superior technology but from their huge amount of users. Zuckerberg succeeded because he was able to attract so many people!

I think all the current and future HIVE apps would strongly benefit by combining them with a successful, thriving blogging platform!

Good to see you posting. You should do it more often!

For me, the (unique?) Value of Hive is as a blockchain for communities. So if you have an online game, an arts app, a premiership football supporters club, a university sorority, a local council, an online business etc etc then Hive can provide you with:

  • Your own cryptocurrency for your community.
  • A blockchain to store assets (assets for your game / NFTs for works made by your artists / collectibles for your football supporters).
  • Online marketplace (for these collectibles / NFTs / or even ordinary goods).
  • A governance structure for running / voting in your community.
  • Built in finance options: financial transfers / fundraising / loans etc with full transparency.
  • Incentivization of tasks and development (as you point out above).
  • A forum for community discussion with the potential to reward community members for their ideas and contributions / showcase work / advertise goods / provide information etc.
  • Community roles: moderation etc.
  • Interaction between communities (e.g. a standardised SMT offering for all football clubs so that fans can use their own club crypto across many club offerings).
  • And all of the above pretty much for free (with the requirement to hold a certain amount of Hive for RCs).

And then you market this to all the world's communities as a (simple!) option to en-crypto their community.

The value of Hive then comes from being:

  • The entry coin for all these SMTs and communities.
  • Necessity for RCs for each community / member.
  • Participation into governance of the overall blockchain.

The underlying SMTs probably provide more upside potential for value. So some form of Defi allowing Hive investors to invest across a fund of SMTs (without doing any work), delegate Hive in return for SMTs, securely loan funds to communities with collateral / margin / escrow could bring that value through to investors.

Hey, I posted a similar proposal, but I'd like to keep it simple for people who are barely used to social media, even if that means limiting features like tokens.

I think that there could be a range of tools and options available at the discretion of each community.

Some communities may only be interested in an immutable forum. For others the opportunity to store assets / NFTs may be key with perhaps the potential to trade them against Hive or Bitcoin.

But I think that SMTs need to be an available option for each community if they want one. It just widens the potential for what you can do as a community if you have your own finance and rewards.

This isn't really something I have to worry about, as specialization on the network really only applies to devs making core changes.

Personally I think that Hive's main use-case will eventually pivot to gaming... to the point of RCs being so expensive that those who don't already have a solid network will probably not even attempt to write a blog because they can make more money on the gaming side anyway. Of course I am extremely biased in this regard so who knows.

In order for gaming to go viral on Hive, devs must be willing to decentralize their product and lose ownership of it. I'm not seeing any of that today. We need to be paying the community to help develop the game in the form of stake and power issued by the game's native currency. The concept of proof of brain and extend far beyond optional tips. We can create real jobs that pay real money... it just takes a bit of innovative organization.

One of the things I'm working on (very slowly, here and there) is a specification document for a Hive Game Development Toolkit. The idea is to provide libraries that developers can use to handle all of the common functions that games would need to do (reading the blockchain, managing delegations, account creation, fungible tokens, NFTs, etc). Then hopefully we can find some developers who can work on building it.

Then, we will have the even harder task of actually getting game developers to use it over all of the other available options. Trust me, this is incredibly difficult. Everyone wants to be on Ethereum right now, or to a lesser degree EOS/WAX. It's incredibly hard to get anyone to go with the small, unknown Hive chain. But, with awesome tooling and hopefully some good, high profile Hive games as examples, I think this can be overcome.

No offense but this is really interesting and maybe should have been included in the OP!

However, I get why it wasn't included and imagine that you're saving this for when you have built-out your game toolkit further and are ready to make some announcements. I think this is a great project to be working on and would encourage more devs to reconsider building here.

It really is hard to compete with ETH at the moment, as it has taken center stage and that's where people want to build. At the same time, they're already experiencing ATHs in Gas fees, pre-bullrun! Meaning that people will certainly be looking around for alternatives that are able to scale and have low/no fees. Also, EOS has a lot of issues last year with people ridiculously high CPU costs that forced many projects to move to sister and side-chains. This leaves the door open for Hive to make a case for being a chain to build on as it has many of the right attributes for gaming and tokenized gaming economies.

Finally, I also think following HF 24 establishing a general direction that much of the greater community buys into will be pivotal in determining Hive's success. These are conversations worth having now to get the ball rolling.

Thanks for putting this post out there, it's important that we put some options on the table to help solidify a vision for the future.

Heh, yeah, well...
When ETH fees flip BTC before a real bull run has even started...
Let's see how long game devs want to keep hacking away at that unscalable dream.
I've been saying for over a year now that ETH's niche is DeFi.
Looks like I might be right.

Honestly, I just think we need one good example...
one good prototype to show the potential here.

It only takes that one person to create a recipe that gets copied and rehashed 1000 times because it actually works and scales up better than the centralized methods.

But yeah obviously having the tools and documentation available to smooth out the whole process would be a huge starting point. Also a lot of these games will become cross-platform. Something super popular on EOS might just decide it's worth it to tap into the Hive community if/when the tools become available to do so.

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I'm happy to see that you recognize the heavy competition among general-purpose blockchains. Other developers who posted their vision recently seemed to lack affinity for what makes Hive unique.

One underdeveloped niche is content-producing organizations that aren't media or advertisers. NGOs, universities, museums, churches, unions, sports teams etc. produce or curate a lot of content that's more interesting than the average Hive post but needs a bit more promotion than the average professional media article. And a one-time investment that could pay off forever is compatible with their donation-based finances.

I've commented about this niche on Steem before, but nothing happened. I'm not the right person to do all the cold-calling and hand-holding that onboarding these institutions would require.

The market is getting crowded with all the different blockchains you mentioned but I still think Hive should still have some sort of first mover advantage especially due to the socially invested community.
As a content creator I am passionate about the blogging aspect but it is far from perfect. I had hoped that this would create one of the worlds best libraries but I can't see that happening in its present state. The seven day window has created a certain populism which doesn't value evergreen content. The last hardforks improved things but it still has a long way to go.
The most popular posts are the ones about the library and the burning of dust votes on comments has disincentived engagement.
I am happy to hear that the larger stake holder would like to move things up a gear and will continue following along in the discussions while I try a steer Hive in the direction I would like.

Great writing form you and I hope you do more. Especially now when we are at a crossroads.

Please see my comment below on this post https://peakd.com/hive/@atma.love/re-yabapmatt-2020816t1345848z (in case you haven't seen it)
Namaste
Atma

I think all of the above use cases (censorship-resistant content blockchain, ad platform, DApps, content discovery/incentivization) make sense and also can work together. The most valuable thing of Hive is its community (users, devs and investors). Everything should be built around that asset. Also noteworthy to add is that Hive with its BitShares roots, has always been a DeFi platform also and even enables to lend and borrow Hive with its delegation system from the very beginning. Hive implemented a social-contract based stablecoin and a DEX (internal market) and also has some interesting new DeFi apps such as hive-engine or the NFT showroom. I think we should also list and promote our DeFi apps on hivedapps.com.

To me, Hive will serve only one main purpose in the future and that is access to the chain through RC credits. SMTs will serve the other purposes.

Yes, of course HIVE tokens are used to get RCs to use the Hive blockchain, but that's just the means to an end. The question here is really about why would people want to use the Hive blockchain and therefore want to get HIVE tokens and RCs.

Yes, in addition to people I would also include companies/organizations. I could see a model where individuals hold a bare minimum HIVE and companies own the majority to allow people to use their services/product. Similar to what Splinterlands is doing.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Matt, I for one would like to see you put a few more imperfect posts out :)

I agree that content without engagement isn't complete, and most of the time I find the most interesting (and funny) text in the commentary.

Does LeoFinance,3Speak,Dapplr dApps can incentivise engagement by adopting engagement oriented Token distribution with some collaboration with Engagement league and ENGAGE Tokens ?

First off, nobody cares about social media. People just use it because they are so damn bored and money is made from adverticements meaning that contents value has always been on that it attracts attention rather that having any authentic quality. In youtube we can see that there are people with 1 million followers, 100 000 views on a video, 10 000 likes and 1000 comments meaning that people don't even care about voting, let alone commenting. Only change I support for distribution of hive is moving power-up rewards to savings account to separate investors and the actual social-side and app users better. Other proposed changes are just providing speculative fixes to non-existent problems (unfair rewards curve etc.).

Secondly, people keep on mixing vision and plan. We allready have the chain with basic functionalities, we don't need any ground-breaking visions but simple updates to expand on those functioinalities, which should be trivial from other than work perspective at this point. This it-self already provides plan for most parts.

Thirdly, I was big in to the smt's, but if custom json transactions can allready provide all that smt's could provide and more, whithout too much complexity to employ, we should just provide proper tools and demo the use cases for people (though remember that people are stupid).

(Thirdly point onetly,) greatest break-trough that block-chain can do for gaming is not that you can trade your assets (though this is part of solution) but that you can finally earn (something concrete) from your labour in video-games. RuneScape (old school) is great example of game that could benefit from tokenizeing it's resources (materials and levels). A simple demo game that looks like Adventure Quest but has some of the elemnts of RuneScape (mining, crafting armor) should be demoed.

Fourthly, adverticement should focus on telling devs about the custom json possibilities of hive block-chain bluntly since it appears that no-one knows about it. Some developers of existing games should also be reached and persuaded to switch or integrate hive, since no other chain even appears to be able to handle games.

@themarkymark @blocktrades @edicted

I've actually been saying that for a couple years now... custom JSON is pretty amazing and no one seems to realize it. Anyone can post JavaScript to the blockchain and sign it so we know it's legit across all frontends.

The real value of blockchain in the context of gaming is that we can provide an unmatched level of provable ownership and decentralized development. Even the game creators can't take away the gold you farmed or the sword you found. On the dev side of things, we can create inflation to incentivize players and enthusiasts to participate in the process of flushing out the product... be it creating levels, skins, content, or whatever else.

Unfortunately it seems like a bit of a waiting game and everyone seems to be absolutely 100% impatient and scrambling while we trade sideways like this.

I see much potential value in all the use cases mentioned above. What I also see is that fundamental to them all is for Hive to improve the governance system.

As some of you will know I have been attempting to attract interest in The Matrix-8 Solution for this purpose, with little success so far. I believe that this potential solution for governance could set Hive in the forefront for trust. Governance is key to all other use cases imo.

Yesterday I read a superb article on this subject which goes into great detail, written by former co-founder of Coinbase Fred Ehrsam. I highly encourage reading the entire article
https://medium.com/@FEhrsam/blockchain-governance-programming-our-future-c3bfe30f2d74
Here are some quotes.

"blockchain governance system design is one of the highest leverage activities known."

"For users: Spend more time looking at the governance system of your blockchain, less time on the issue of the day. Current events are just a manifestation of the larger system that caused them. So while it’s easy to get riled up by the news, the highest leverage point for change comes from designing or changing the system, not arguing about its current manifestations."

"I believe governance should be the primary focus of investors in the space. The fundamentals of cryptoeconomics and overarching governance schemas of these networks are critical to survival, under-appreciated, and poorly understood. Investors can add significant value through the luxury of being able to observe and learn from multiple projects at one time. They should be active in the governance of the tokens they participate in and transparent with a community if they feel the design of the system can be improved."

I think anonymous deliberation and voting plus Trusted Reputation are two key areas of good decentralised governance which are not in place with the Hive DPOS. Fred talks about these in his article. I also note that Vechain are working on an anonymous voting system for the same reasons.

Anyway, I encourage all to read the article linked to above AND to read about The Matrix-8 Solution (a multi-level, real time Pure Democrity) which I feel strongly addresses many of the issues mentioned and can make Hive a leading Blockchain and attract billions of users for the governance (and voting) system for worldwide use cases.

This post answers some questions about Matrix-8 https://peakd.com/hive-153630/@atma.love/matrix-8-questions-and-answers

This link is for the New Age DApps community where you can find more posts including the white paper for Matrix-8 https://peakd.com/c/hive-153630/created

Namaste
Atma

If the community can hold it together until it forks into something useful.

Here's what an internet rando thinks:
All that info that gets used to target advertisements at me, well - I should get a cut of what people are paying to target me. So, if you take the HIVE into advertisement, I'd do it with that built in. Probably do a thing where interacting on a HIVE-powered app that successfully hands off into HIVE account creation means: you have cryptomoney! Now figure out how to cash out if you can.

I'm crazy layman, but my hunch is that the cryptosocial network that manages information targeting right will come out second (below what the sheep are taught to use). That weird 7-day window to value a post is odd AF, innit? Do I even understand that correctly?

It seems to me that if THAT is going to be a thing, then shit posts below a 'transaction threshold' shouldn't be written to the chain in perpetuity... but that's for smarter folks than me.

I will say this tribe thing turns me on. Where the coin is just the base operating currency and the token topper is like stock in the project. Maybe run with that.

I think the email angle is way underplayed too. I'll receive spam messages if you let me set the pricepoint they have to "postage-stamp" to get my attention. Add a recursive cut to the system while you're at it. Then sure, tell me about your boner-pills bro.

You think crypto is an opportunity to create a morality overlay for advertisements? Community smear marks replace the better-business-bureau and the naughtier you are the more expensive it is for you to advertise?

Stay salty friends. I feel a lot better about this place than I did about steeeeem. Like it filtered a layer of competence off the top of that potential soap.

Oh a lot of ideas!

We need a Debit card, something like Crypto.com, so we can spend our HIVEs!
PicsArt_081602.23.08.jpg

We have to know what people use to do online... There is a super interesting report here:
https://wearesocial.com/blog/2020/01/digital-2020-3-8-billion-people-use-social-media

We need some serious promotion, like Grayscale's last video or Galaxy's ad on Financial Times... I liked also @roomservice's idea to promote on Brave browser.

Thanks again for your post!

Hugs

Hivelander The Mannequin

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Actually much more was expected from you about what new direction Hive can Take. May be you write about that in your future posts...

Hive currently - seems directionless. But having blogging inbuilt into the blockchain has made this and steem the most scrutinized blockchains. So I also consider that that has made them bit robust. The trx speed and relatively free trx is something that we need to capitalize on...

Oh man ... I miss reading those HN comments. How the heck did Paul Graham attract those folks to his platform to begin with? His book “Hackers & Painters” is worth a read.

Please see my comment below on this post https://peakd.com/hive/@atma.love/re-yabapmatt-2020816t1345848z (in case you haven't seen it)
Namaste
Atma

I think the most realistic path forward is something in between what you're suggesting.

Having everyone focused on making Hive the absolute best at one specific thing will give it a much better chance at being successful than if we have our relatively small community split between many different things (like we have now).

I think the best we can hope for is a tier of priorities. I think for all the different users here, someone will think any one of the options you mentioned is "THE OBVIOUS ONE" and anyone that says different is a stupid idiot who should be shunned.

It's always going to be based on people's areas of expertise as well. If you're a hammer, you want to use nails to solve every problem because that's what you know.

As a content creator and designer, I see content and improved design in the apps that deliver them as a path to success.

A developer probably sees the most promise in Hive as a development platform, etc.

I definitely would love to see more collaboration and leveraging of everyone's strengths and knowledge and hope we can figure this all out, because the potential will be endless if we do.

Please see my comment below re. this post: https://peakd.com/hive/@atma.love/re-yabapmatt-2020816t1345848z (in case you haven't seen it)
Namaste
Atma

Hive is already a development platform and that should definetely be the focus. SMTs are the way to make that development platform better, since Dapps want to launch their own tokens.

But, advertising is a low hanging fruit and can definitely be implemented quickly. The "burn to promote" feature already exists and was tried in PAL net.

Peakd is already using their own version of it, and it is burning hive everyday. Advertisers are not aware of it yet, and peakd have no incentive to have an add programm since they don't earn the burned hive.

This needs time.

Glad to read from witnesses and their thoughts about the chain future. Interestingly I share most of your thoughts on the areas that might make Hive different - no slimy shit - will get back with a longer one later. Not mentioning Marketing again - for now re-blogged.

Sabemos que eso no es constante a veces sube y a veces baja, hay que perceverar, gracias por compartir, te dejo mi voto y te sigo.

@yabapmatt of all people how did you not mention blockchain gaming as a use case? Or would you bundle this into apps. keep up the good fight brother 👊

Thank you @themarkymark for mentioning gaming 🙏🙏

My thoughts on the future...

I think they lump it into dapp's.

This is a line of thinking that needs to change if we are going to grow.

Exactly, niche!!

!BRO

bro.gif

You have just been bro-fisted by the guys in the man cave and now have 1 more BRO. Enjoy!**

For more info, please give us a look in here: https://discord.gg/qd8J2x3

Para mie el mejor concepto, de la vida es vivir el presente, el futuro es incierto, gracias por compartir, te voto y te sigo.

We should start building some prototypes leveraging the 2nd layer of the blockchain and then we should also promote that by using some DAO funds to attract app developers to build on hive. There can be many use cases of that - we can build a few to just show how it works.

And we can use some other authentication mechanism to just make sure real people use that, like some bio-metric based OTP such as Aadhar for India.

I think, at this moment, we should really spend a good amount of the DAO fund to promote.

Happy to see your blog again.

Bitcoin Cash has Read.cash
Bitcoin SV has something called powchain or something.
Uprend and Libry are trying to compete with Hive.

In my opinion We need to focus Developing and improving our Social dApps while Growing Hive Network effects.

Also I see Twitter/Hive as USD/Bitcoin and we should be using Twitter to trade collaborate/partnerships/onboarding/Network effects to our Hive

Dear @yabapmatt

Hive’s future as a 2nd layer blockchain network

I've been thinking a lot lately about idea of moving rewards to 2nd layer and I'm wondering: if neither Steem or HIVE managed (with all it's resources) to create enough value and demand - then how can we expect that those who would launch their tokens (2nd layer) will succeed?

Steem-engine and hive-engine are great example. Literally hardly any token have a value. I'm afraid that most would fail (failure is to be expected in my opinion).

Yours, Piotr

If we need to choose one thing, definitely gaming. Gamers understand ingane currency and market.

Around games there are always people posting content, creating communities etc.

Also it’s one of the biggest markets in the world.

I am more interested as HIVE being closer to a stable-coin "layer 1" for Dapp development.
I always refer it to people as a "utility" token.

That is the use case we are using for our projects.

I think continuing to build the backbone and structure of Hive to serve multiple purposes is the best strategy right now. The use case of Hive for gaming is growing pretty good, the game builders are learning more and more about what they need Hive Backbone wise in order to progress to the next level. To me the game side of block chain technology is like the old school game developers before everyone got bought out, they are pushing the envelope of the tech.

The social interaction side is also pushing the boundaries, we have several nice front ends, the social users are telling the front end developers what they would like to see and how they would like to see the system progress, once again pushing the edges of the technology.

Just two parts of the Hive Block Chain experience, there is room for them both, and room for so much more, I don't think the focus should be on just one use case, Hive Block Chain is the use case.

Steem was becoming stagnant, no growth, they kept pushing SMT and other block chain developments further and further down the line, they were becoming complacent and taking a good enough attitude on any developments they did do.

Focus if one must but focus on the big picture for now. There are so many people building out applications, and those applications going in so many different directions, they are using what is there, and building what they need to use and sharing it.

HIVE.D!
From the Ship!

I’m here on HIVE to sharing news, photo, passion and grow as a united community!