What’s in your wallet?
Do you have liquid HIVE? HBD? do you have Hive Power? none of the above?
Does it matter what you have in your wallet? What does it say about your commitment?
Once again, the Crypto Maniacs got me thinking…
As Task put it on episode 195 of Cryptomaniacspod at 00:26:26:
If you don’t have any skin in the game, it’s easy to just walk away
So are people who don’t have skin in the game, less committed to HIVE?
I don’t have an absolute answer to the questions above, but I do tend to feel more at ease with fellow Hiveans who have skin in this game. Some of them have bought HIVE on the open market, which means their betting money, some of them have earned their HIVE through content creation and curation, and they’ve invested the most scarce resource there is: time. Most are a mix of investing money and time, and thus have some skin in the game.
What does skin in the game mean?
Well, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains in his book Skin In the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life: you need to own your own risks. Whenever you’re exposed to the potential upside of something (reaping the benefits of that thing), you should also be exposed to the potential downside (pay the price if something goes wrong), and you shouldn't be able to delegate or transfer the downside to someone else. In other words, there should be symmetry.
Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash
Let’s look at a couple of examples
H.E. Justin Rugpull
Photo by Calvin Sit; Bloomberg Getty Images
Let’s say there is a hypothetical Chinese business guy who starts selling a shitcoin to gullible investors. There is a risk of the token crashing to zero but he’s making lot’s of money right now. And if the token goes to zero, he can simply start a new project, claim the market conditions weren’t right, and maybe even start a new one; no consequences suffered. Meanwhile, the folks who invested in his token have lost all their money with nobody to ask for help.
Commander Baloo von Bruinwald XIII
Captain Baloo earns a good salary for taking people (or cargo) from point A to point B in his plane in the safest way possible. If he were to make a mistake and crashes the plane, thereby killing all his passengers, he will pay a high price for his mistake, and this risk is not transferrable to someone else.
So who’s got skin in the game?
That's right! Captain Baloo.
Skin in the game in business
At the company, I often find myself quoting Julius Caesar: If you want something done right, you must do it yourself.
And of course! how could it be otherwise? My employees are not exposed to the same upside as me, so I’m the one with skin in the game. They simply don’t care enough.
What about calculating costs, profit margins or reading financial statements?
I could have taken every class under the sun in college in statistics, finance, technical analysis, etc. And none of if would have prepared me quite like having skin in the game. I suddenly didn't find sitting down to write and fine-tune budgets, analyzing cashflows and balance sheets to be quite so boring.
Why? because all my money is on the line.
Skin in the game in investing
When it comes to cryptocurrency investing, I’ve heard people say
Don’t tell me what you “think”; just show me your portfolio.
Ha! so that means all the shitcoin shills and rugpull NFT project teams are not buying into their own tokens with no use case? You mean to tell me they're only HODLing Bitcoin and HIVE???
So having (or not having)skin in the game could be a method of bullshit detecting? hmmmm interesting!
So what does this say about people that talk about community, and GO HIVE! but aren't taking any risks?
In regular business, if they were in top management, I wouldn't buy shares of that company. I'd only invest in that company if top management were also some of the largest shareholders.
So I'd say these hypothetical Hiveans with no skin in the game could potentially lean towards short term gains over to long term benefits of the protocol.
Someone like @theycallmedan or @taskmaster4450, on the other hand, are in the same boat as the rest of us. Remember Captain Baloo?
That's right. If this shit goes down, the Hiveans with skin in the game go down with it.
So I'm going to say I have a proclivity towards Hiveans with some MFin skin in the game. So wear your SITG proudly, like a badge of honor.
Cover Photo credits: Chris Liverani on Unsplash