Of apathy and capitulation
I've seen quite a few people down in the dumps on crypto and specifically the Hive network lately. Being at new lows while assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum are still clearly in bull market territory is always a bit depressing and demoralizing, but it is what it is. We seem to be repeating a somewhat common cycle. This time was not different, yet again. Shocker, I know.
"Can devs do something?"
This often leads our citizens to flounder about and speculate on what needs to be changed to "fix" the "problem". I often refer to this stage as "bear market thinking" or "bear market ideas". Unfortunately this is a phase that can last for multiple years which can grind the nerves in a battle of attrition during that time.
Every bear market communities freak out and think it's an amazing idea to completely change the tokenomics of their system to make number go back up again.
The ultimate backfire
It's a good thing that the actual people who run this pony show are a bit more conservative than the average user because if the top brass was willing to change the network as often as the community clamored out for change we'd be in quite a bit of trouble. There is such a thing as contact switches and diminishing returns. The more we flip flop about the less serious we look to every spectator watching from the sidelines. That being said a fish out of water that isn't flip-flopping around is just a dead fish, so there is some kind of balance that needs to be struck in all situations.
Typical complaints
When users analyze Hive and look for problems that need fixing, what are they saying?
Low engagement and poor user retention.
Definitely to be expected during these dry-spells of low price and subsequent morale and energy. Although I'm actually not sure if our retention rates are that bad compared to average retention rates across other platforms. Getting people to stay on a platform and become daily active users is a huge issue across the entire industry and even the Internet itself. It can always be better because the number habitually looks bad on paper no matter which app we're addressing.
The ironic thing about low engagement on Hive during periods like this is that this is ultimately the easiest time to get noticed and expand one's social network. It's almost impossible to have your voice heard during the blaring racket of a bull market unless you've already put in the legwork required during these downtimes. Whether this is a crisis or an opportunity largely depends on individual perspective. For example my posts are making less USD but more Hive. Am I in trouble or a savvy investor? Depends on different factors like distressed selling and where we'll be next year.
Nepotism
The age-old complaint that's always valid no matter where we are in the cycle. Lovingly called friend-voting or even circle-jerking by those who want to put an extremely negative connotation to the action. I'd call it supporting the social network we've been cultivating for the past however many years.
It's a very crude system we have going here, but to be fair to ourselves every single cryptocurrency out there is a crude system that is just barely good enough to operate on the long term (if they're lucky). We can't tell people how to think or what to vote. Free will is the foundation of this whole shebang. There's never going to be a situation where the "best" content gets all the upvotes especially when that account just got here and has no presence or consistency. I feel like the idea of what Hive is supposed to be is often more dangerous than the supposed problems themselves.
What even is "quality content"?
Honestly I find it a bit comical at this point that as far as I know Hive has never had a really good investment advisor or portfolio management system. Imagine if there was even one user here that we could just copy-trade and make some free money over time. That would be a very high value account with very high value content on a measurable level. And yet all we see across the entire industry is seemingly a bunch of degenerates betting the farm in the most dangerous and high-risk manner. There's gotta be a better way we just haven't found it yet.
Mismanaged dev funds
It's been a bit more common as of late to bash the proposal system and the consistent bleed coming from the @hive.fund. I'm personally on record as being very much against the ninjamine being thrown into the dev fund when it could of just as easily been burned. Our value as a network is contained within the liquidity pools not money that got printed out of thin air.
All that being said when we take a good look at the numbers and inflation rates it can easily be determined that our volatility has very little to do with the money we print. Generously rounding up to 10% inflation per year and the spot price volatility towers above that giving us potentially x100 swings greater than this number. No one ever complains about volatility when number-go-up, but they really should because that's the exact reason why it can crash so violently and put us into these positions in the first place. During our last cycle Hive price went x30 and this was considered "deserved" and "entitled". But then when the 95% downswing hits everything is broken and needs to be fixed in a mad-dash last-ditch gambit. These are inconsistent ideologies that need to be resolved by responsible adults.
So what would I change?
Well I've been around the block a few times. I've had a lot of ideas (some quite bad in retrospect) and all my ideas were heard, and some of them were even implemented at the core level. At this point I wouldn't change a thing as far as hardforks are concerned. I think we're doing pretty well on that front and I leave the optimization and interoperability tinkering to the professionals. Maybe I'd add a 25% downvote option on proposals but that's about it.
Changes to the inflation schedule are not going to fix volatility/stability problems; in fact they are almost guaranteed to make them worse.
This is a mathematical certainty.
Take the best-case scenario as an example that ironically doubles as a cautionary tale. Let's assume some wizard appears and waves their magic wand and fixes all of our problems: making Hive a near-perfect network. What happens then? Ah well the price goes x1000 during the bull market and crashes 99% during the bear. Everyone that bought the top loses everything and we're right back where we started as a network. That's not helpful.
Build more and change less.
While Hive doesn't require changes to the core code, this doesn't imply that the network itself won't make radial changes and look completely different in the future. We tend to focus way too much on tinkering with what we have rather than building out new infrastructure that we desperately need. We need deep decentralized liquidity pools and we need off-chain data storage. Both of these problems are already being worked on through multiple fronts. All we can do is hope that they work themselves out or try to help.
Buy Bitcoin?
It took me a while to figure this out but anyone that wants more power on Hive should probably own a big stack of BTC. BTC has quite simply proven itself to be a better long term investment than any other asset on the planet. What's most interesting about this is that Bitcoin always underperforms during the 4th year of the cycle (2025) which means that pretty much every other year it has to outperform the alts to bridge this gap.
This is a situation that will become easier to navigate as basic infrastructure continues to come online. As a Hive bull it's obviously a lot easier to acquire and justify holding BTC if it's providing liquidity and value to the network in the form of a liquidity pool. We are on the cusp of that tech right now so it's a fairly promising (albeit risky & cutting edge) development.
What can we learn from other networks that do similar things?
This is a question I'm constantly coming back to and the answer baffles me every time. What can we learn about other protocols and communities who are in the same vein? What strategies are working for them that we could employ to better our own system?
The answer is... null
- Friend.Tech is a failure.
- Stars Arena is a failure.
- Bluesky hasn't done anything interesting.
- NOSTR lacks all the necessary incentives to ensure decentralization.
- Farcaster went nowhere.
Name a single crypto that I can go to and earn money for doing some work.
It just doesn't exist.
Even at rank #420 on the market cap we are still still at the tippy top with the longest runtime.
It's quite a sight to behold.
Conclusion
Number going down is not a good reason to demand permanent changes to core code. A network like Hive has all the tools it needs to build permissionlessly without the need for consensus. I'm as guilty as anyone else in terms of the current demoralization, but I'm not going to let that get under my skin. That only leads to rash decisions that can just as easily make the situation worse.
The cycle continues to play out exactly as it has in the past. Nothing we do can stop that now; it's baked into the cake at this point. All we can do now is decide if the glass if half empty or half full.