So we just dodged the bullet on an existential threat, and from where we are now, we owe a huge thank you to Justin Sun. It's sort of like how I now appreciate and am thankful to kids who were assholes and bullies when I was growing up because I see now that they successfully prepared me for life and made me stronger.

Everything that just happened needed to happen. It's needed to happen for a long time and it almost certainly wouldn't have happened without someone as fucking batshit crazy as Justin has exposed himself to be. There were still those of us that were thinking something could be worked out all the way up to the end, but then there were moves that were clearly irredeemable and demonstrated that this is not someone that can be reasoned with and that we only had one path forward. Justin didn't leave us any wiggle room and I'm sure unintentionally made Hive a lot stronger than it would have been had he been more reasonable.

For this I will be forever grateful to Justin Sun...thank you for being a total fucking lunatic. We couldn't have done it without you.

So on to the meat of this post. Along with just about every other application built for Steem, OpenSeed will be moving over to Hive, and as a spoiler to what the rest of this post is about I want to make a sensational comment.

I DON'T THINK HIVE WILL SUCCEED WITHOUT OPENSEED OR SOMETHING LIKE OPENSEED.

Now there's a good chance you don't even know wth OpenSeed is, so hopefully that gets you interested enough in this post to actually read it. Also for full transparency, while I don't get paid to shill OpenSeed, I have been paid from the funds that were promised to go to community collaborators. All that said, this is my honest opinion as someone who knows a fair amount about Hive(Steem) and OpenSeed.

Before we were fighting for the life of our blockchain, Steem had plenty of problems. The same issues we'd been facing for years. It's too hard, onboarding, lack of features, etc.

We still have all those problems and OpenSeed is a solution to a nice chunk of them. This image shows how OpenSeed fits into the stack of the relationship between the Hive blockchain and applications.

_{credit to @andrarchy for this}

Having a dedicated database specifically for OFFCHAIN information takes some of the biggest problems for Hive and makes them fairly trivial. Exhibit A and the first solution OpenSeed will be offering...chat.

_{Something I made a while back, that I don't think ever got used for anything}

Chat needs to be private, Hive is public. You probably don't want your chat to be immutable. Three seconds is slow for chat, there's numerous reasons why this doesn't work onchain and OpenSeed will allow Hive dapps to tap into a single cross platform(desktop/mobile/whatever), cross application(hive.blog/PeakD/ESteem/OpenLink/Whatever), chat experience that will be consistent and fluid across all apps that decided to integrate it.

That's cool, what else???

Well now we enter into the realm that I'm actually most comfortable in. The creative realm, the place of things that COULD be. So let me paint a picture of some other things OpenSeed COULD be used for.

Lite Accounts/Offchain Accounts

There is a cost associated with creating a blockchain account and for that account to be able to transact it needs at least a little bit of HivePower. Also that account has several keys with varying levels of permissions. The brand new user doesn't know what HivePower is or how to get it. They don't understand what it means when I say making an account has a "cost", there is a good chance they don't know what keys are or how to securely store them.

Using OpenSeed, we can make user accounts as easily as every other social application. They could even post and comment with that lite account. If they want to earn rewards, they'd need to "upgrade" their account to a full blockchain account. This would lower the barrier to entry to Hive by a huge margin and something like this is the ONLY solution that I've heard that makes sense. Again, this information can be shared across applications to provide a cohesive experience across all hive dapps and we could have a similar experience to what we have now(all apps showing the same information) only we'd have an additional layer for offchain information and content.

That's cool, what else???

Better question, keeping in mind the stack shown above where we have a blockchain base for things that absolutely need to be onchain,(property, transactions, content that we want to be immutable), an offchain layer for things that we don't want onchain,(chat, lite accounts, whatever else), and the application layer that takes these two layers and leverages them for its own specific needs, what CAN'T we do? OpenSeed is the missing structural piece that makes everything possible.

Also, let's not forget, this is all open source. In this last catastrofe, as I mentioned above, we're sort of lucky that Justin was as egregious as he was because we got pretty much all our dapps, open and closed source, but for us to be as strong and secure as possible, we want to whenever possible have our foundational pieces be open source. hive.blog was able to pop up easily because Condenser is open source. We all win when we develop slick and powerful open source software and that is a core value of the group developing OpenSeed.

So if you can't tell, I've drank the kool-aid of OpenSeed and I hope you'll join me. Hive is in such an amazing position right now and we have an opportunity to take this chain to heights that we couldn't have just weeks ago. No more ninja mined stake, positive marketing, positive momentum. The Swarm is coming!

😋 Anyway, thanks for reading. See you all in the next post!