¿Eggs or Chickens?
I guess we all over here have heard before stories of the fortunate few who happened to mine at the start of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Steem and other PoW coins. And how these people made a fortune, or could have made a fortune with their early ninja mining, right? Which all of the sudden... some of these went DPoS.
Yeah DPoS. And from that time until today, right now we have a situation where our early "social" blogging could be likened to the early mining opportunity. I mean, back in the days Steem rewards were very high for "content creation" and these rewards were shared between a very small pool of creators. Can you guess how high those rewards were?
And well, let's say that many of those peculiar features and luxurious DPoS things were inherited to a greater or lesser extent by Hive four years ago. ¿Can you imagine?
But well, yes, let's also say that at that PoW time there really weren't so many people who mined Steem. As there were also very few people who had the opportunity to mine Steem through their early "social" blogging or PoB. Yeah! PoB = "Proof of Brain" chump.
And by that time when the DPoS phase began back in May or June 2016. There really shouldn't have been many more than ~15k active users on the blockchain who actually mined Steem through Proof of Brain. Yup, Proof of Brain, PoB & "Social Blogging" are all the same.
Which for that nascent and small community of barely 15k "active users" or much less. I suspect much of this had something to do with and explains pretty well the high monetary rewards that this disruptive “social network” on the blockchain was able to reward and award with to a few lucky and privileged few in the beginning.
Because also all of the sudden and in the midst of all this initial idyll, a serious problem suddenly arose. A serious and severe problem that was even more intense for the early ninja miners. In order to guarantee the scalability of the project and the protection/profitability of their early capital investments. ¡Holy crap! We need to onboard more users and investors!
And then that was that. Some new scholarly and algebraic mathematics necessarily had to be applied presto. The level of adoption needed to be raised. We needed more new users, more investors, more "social" bloggers, more pack donkeys... if we really wanted to increase the marketcap of the project and raise the price of our currency.
And at that point someone said: Ok, let's say if 1000x more people arrives, then the reward pool for blogging will have to be divided ÷1000x and obviously everybody will be competing for far less money. And they are and have been precisely our very high rewards that have served as the perfect bait to attract and onboard the fifteen thousand oxen that we now have. ¿How do we resolve this paradox? This would be the equivalent of "difficulty" going up to x1000 in mining. ¿To what extent could we reduce the value of rewards without affecting adoption? ¿Would they still come?
Yeah, they would still keep coming! Said another one out there. Because all this could be mitigated to some degree by a price rise. Although a price rise cannot scale to the same level as adoption. For example, it is possible to multiply the user base x1000, but is it probable to multiply our token marketcap x1000? To let's say, 300 billion USD?
And it gives me the impression and I have the suspicion that from that moment and from there on. Those early ninja miners of the old chain and that we have now and still here in Hive, they all come carrying that puzzle and conundrum with them within their heads to this day.
¿When Lambo Habibi?
Oh! wait a bit. And I will tell you right away from Dubai.
The current math formula:
If you are sharing a message that opposes the status-quo, and you have enough people hearing that message to potentially make a difference, then you are most certainly going to run into some difficulty. That difficulty will often come in the form of censorship. This happens in many forms, but in this post I want to focus on HIVE censorship specifically.
The truth of the matter is that, your right to free speech is dependent on your lack of influence. If you are someone whose voice is heard by few, then maybe you are welcome to say whatever you want to say. However, if you are someone whose message is reached by a significant amount of ears, then your right to free speech is a lot more debatable.
Whether you have your account banned or blacklisted. Your content flagged, downvoted and zeroed. Your income pulled or everything you write hidden with shadow bans or any method of censorship is inconsequential. If steps are being taken to reduce the amount of people that are seeing or hearing what you have to say, then your right to free speech has been violated.
So yeah, there are those who possess a great amount of influence on this site, and they can, as they have shown, use their HIVE power to flag and downvote posts that they do not want others to see.
The problem with the current HIVE's voting reward system is not that ~15% get 85% of the rewards, but it is that the selection of that 15% is done only by the 1%. And this is motivating the wrong behaviors and the focus on such lame quality of the content produced that we can see over here these days.
Should there be a mass adoption of HIVE with hundreds of millions of people joining the site? And should a mass of intelligent rational free thinkers find their way to this site and start posting their truths here? ¿Yes?, then there would no doubt be steps taken to censor the information they would be sharing. Because in reality...
...they don't want any more new people who think by themselves in this community!