Seriously, sometimes my observations about the fate of Hive might come across as a letter to the editor!
"I watched with interest as the price of the Hive token slowly increased over the past few weeks, only to come crashing back down... probably at the moment someone realized they could sell and eek out a tiny profit. Will they ever learn?"
Yes, I am a bit of a cynic.
The conditions were even "right" for Hive to have a good period: The best times for Hive are typically when Bitcoin is going sideways on modest to anemic volume. Well, we had that, for a couple of weeks, and Hive clawed its way from less than $0.20 to $0.26.
I thought to myself "This is nice, but someone who's getting paid substantially from the DHF is going to notice and try to cash out at a beneficial rate."
I don't know if that's what actually happened, but this graph pretty accurately seems to represent the world of Hive.
Screenshot from Coinmarketcap
Of course, we're still up — relatively speaking — so I suppose we should be glad for that.
If you've been part of this community for a good long while, you're probably aware that we can mostly describe Hive's long-term performance as "nothing happened."
Which has always struck me as rather weird, given that this place actually has a lot to offer, including a strong community and quite a few independent projects being worked on.
But it's also where we run into one of the fundamental issues perpetually facing Hive: There are many good reasons to be part of Hive, but not nearly as many reasons to be INVESTED in Hive.
I mean, let's just shine the light on the proverbial elephant in the room: Hive is busy marketing itself as a place where people can earn rewards for creating content, so why wouldn't you expect people to want to always be cashing out those rewards?
I can assure you that people on YouTube aren't monetizing their content with an eye towards letting the money stay on YouTube or even investing in Alphabet stock (Google being YouTube's parent company), they are taking that money right out to pay bills, buy pizza and buy $9 a carton eggs.
Come on, follow the logic here, folks!
I may sound cynical, but I am definitely a "Hive Evangelist" of sorts... I believe there's definitely something amazing and awesome here. But we can delude ourselves that Hive is something it's not, nor that we are somhow exempt from the vagaries of human nature, simply because we are "decentralized and on the blockchain."
As a standalone argument, that one goes no further than those in the late 1990s who thought simply declaring "we have a domain name and a web site" was all you needed to end up rolling in the millions.
It's not that easy, folks!
Which brings me back to something I found myself thinking, back when I first encountered Hive (and its legacy chain): maybe it would be a better idea to promote Hive not so much as a place to rean rewards, as a place where creating content affords you the opportunity to — in a sense — become co-owner of the venue where you are parking your content.
It's all in the phrasing... effectively, we are doing the same thing as before.
It's just a thought...
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