HiveAuctions
It all started with a message I read in the Bro Lounge from @themarkymark about @hiveauctions. He mentioned it was like penny auctions (which was unknown to me at the time) and I decided to check that out later. And then I forgot about it. He wrote this post about the whole thing four days ago, which you can read here.
Bidding can be fun
Now I have to say that in the past I've won a few auctions bidding on day trips back in Holland but usually I noticed that people went bananas bidding and I even discovered quite a few times that they went as far as overbidding the original price of the trip/product up for auction. I knew right there and then that you should be a bit careful taking part in auctions.
Catawiki
I had better experiences when learning about Catawiki to auction off art, antique and collectables which opened a whole new world to me and my boyfriend when we were very happy with the distraction and learned quite a lot while doing so. It was clear the bidders there were more careful and paid more attention to timing. I haven't looked at these auctions for many years until a few months ago and only won one auction which was a good deal, thankfully.
Hive Auctions
And then I suddenly noticed the post about the first Hive auction being live yesterday evening. 100 Hive was being auctioned and to send in a bid, 1 hive needed to be transfered and with every bid, the auction would be extended for another hour. I figured that I could miss a few hive to try and get that 100 Hive, but not go nuts on bidding.
Initially, I was trying to create a bit of content and hoping to finish it in time to get in bed a bit earlier because of a bad night the night before. I failed because I wanted to participate hoping that the first auction wouldn't have as many eyes on them yet, giving me a better shot at winning it.
I took the screenshot above when I was close to winning the first auction and then I got outbid somewhere in the last 2 minutes if I remember correctly. I decided I was going to bed rather than seeing if this was going to end, as with every bid the auction was extended another hour and my daughter needed to arrive at school in time in the morning, lol.
Still ongoing
To my surprise, I noticed in the morning that the auction was still open and somewhere in the morning, I put in a bid and got outbid at the very last minute. That was my second bid and I decided to try one more time, hoping others would loose track of time due to being busy with real life and then get lucky. The auction gods were on my side apparently because this happened:
I won!
We came back from picking up our daughter and a package and then I saw the notification about the auction ending and my name was there. I almost forgot about it myself, so that was extra sweet. I noticed that the final price of the 100 Hive was 0.49 Hive, meaning I spent 3.49 Hive to receive the 100 Hive that was up for auction. Clearly this is not sustainable for the auction house..
The price going up by 0.01 Hive each time is probably a bit too low if you ask me but I read that @themarkymark mentioned it was an experiment and that he already predicted that the userbase of Hive was not big enough to make this sustainable.
Maybe some tweaks can be done?
Looking at 49 bids, I don't know from how many users this was, I can imagine that without any promotion this is not going to work for him but maybe with some tweaks in the system on how it works as well as promoting this to a bigger part of our users, it could become successful. I don't know if this is something in the planning though.
If not, I realise that I didn't just get lucky today, but probably got really lucky as I may be the only one ever winning this. I'm very grateful either way and in case the project is going to be developed any further, maybe by other projects auctioning off things, maybe NFT's from @nftshowroom or other tokens, I want to at least do my part and share my experience and spread the word.
Prize received
I was pleased to see the prize was sent not too long after sending the 0.49 Hive.
Thanks for this experience @themarkymark @hiveauctions, and who knows if it doesn't work out now, maybe in the future this is something that can be sustainable.
Have you been participating in the bidding or did you totally miss the action?