It's been a long week with the Hard Fork. Still a lot of work to do especially since most bots and scripts need to be upgraded. There's a lot of community questions about who is actually involved. The answer is everyone.
Hive is not a project that's carried out by small groups. It's not just "Top 20 witnesses" or "Blocktrades". Some contribute more than others, true. That being said, there are a lot of people involved in every single aspect of this entire blockchain, its ecosystem and everything that can possible have to do with its existence. Participation isn't limited to a select group.
Witnesses
Many witnesses are also developers. Being a developer on Hive and being a witness goes hand in hand because you need to understand how the chain operates and blocks are processed and signed, as well as to be able to monitor block production. Some operate as teams, some as individuals. Witnesses aren't magically more in control of Hive than developers because for the very simple reason that to be able to provide input you need to know wtf you're talking about. You cannot affect changes without having any idea as to what you're talking about. Remember that others have to approve the changes and everything to do with development is entire transparent by the very virtue of Hive being a public blockchain.
We all came from an artificially-toxic ecosystem that was sold to an even more toxic cesspool and is still rotting in its own filth. Hive was born of that. A few months back I put out a post about the various myths that were perpetuated. They are all BS and reversed. The myth of "access to stakeholders". I don't know anyone who thinks they're too important to reply to a message, although many take a while due to being flooded by them. That's just one example. Those myths are just myths and they're dead. We all have to move forward for the greater benefit of Hive.
Contributions
There are also myriad small tasks that all add up towards the management of Hive. These can be tiny tasks such as setting up someone in a chat or major tasks such as putting in a key Pull Request. They all add up because they need to get done. One person cannot possibly accomplish all these. That's the real value of Hive; everyone can participate in it.
Participation does require an open mind and coordiantion. You have to work with your fellow contributors and not against them. It's not a competition. The greatest damage to morale was done by Ned in the past where he cherrypicked whom he liked. That's done now. If you take the Whitepaper workflow as an example, you will see in that post that everyone in the entire ecosystem had a chance to contribute (credits coming soon). That's just one example. Look at libraries, at tools, at all the Issues people are putting up on Gitlab, etc.
In no specific order:
- Code contributions to core
- Code contributions to frontends
- Libraries and contributions to them
- Tools and APIs
- Communication on community chats
- Hiveio account and the managed social media
- Coordinating for various needs
- Testing and issue identification
- Running witness nodes
- Marketing and outreach
- Running seed, RPC nodes, seeds
- Devops help and methods
- Exchange coordination
- Key documentation
- Support for dapps
It's 50% technical and 50% communication/coordination. That's the reality of a decentralized project. Many of these contributions are qualitative and their value cannot be measured by any means. Selflessly passing on a key contact with an Exchange to a person who is in a better position to make use of it is a contribution of utmost importance but it's value cannot be measured or even made known.
Value
The value of Hive isn't just in the value of the HIVE currency. Do you play video games or board games because they pay you? No. You do those things because you want to and it adds other types of value to your life. They entertain you, you meet others, you relax after work, etc. There is no monetary value you can place on a game of CS with a buddy.
Hive is interesting. It's interesting as all hell to be part of something that's evolving and where you can influence it. Everyone is a stakeholder, irrespective of how much is in their accounts. You are free to contribute in any way you want to any part of the Hive ecosystem you want. Gaining experience and knowledge is more personally valuable than gaining a few bucks. Consider how much transferable skills are worth if granted by an educational institution. When you participate in Hive you improve yourself and the entire ecosystem, you help others improve, you build something bigger than one person.
The control of Hive is in your hands, whomever you are. You are not some outlier or some victim to whom some identified group you are not part of owes something. You are part of that group as this is a public and decentralized ecosystem.
Small Task
Want to do something now? Like the images above? Grab the full presentation https://hive.blue/images/HiveEcosystem.pdf and send it or link it to someone not on Hive. Anyone at all. You don't even need to upload it, just send them the link.
Support us by voting our @guiltyparties witness. All earnings go back into our Hive tech!