Crypto prices over the last 24 hours or so have been.... exciting.
And not necessarily in a good way. I'd like to see less sudden drops and a gradual climb back to prices at least decent enough that my portfolio is no longer in the red compared to how much I've invested.
Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay, edited by Me
There are two dominant crypto's in my portfolio; BTC and HIVE. Plus bits and bobs of about a dozen other things.
While I am reasonably comfortable holding both the two main ones, I definitely feel more secure with HIVE. For what it's worth, I also feel that both are more secure than fiat currency, which is backed by nothing in particular and can be (and is) printed at will by governments. De La Rue printers go brrrr.......
As for my reasons....
Susceptibility to Manipulation
Both HIVE and BTC have decentralised governance models which mean they can't be directly targeted by regulators in the way that (for example) the CEO's of centralised exchanges can.
But BTC is being heavily bought and sold by legacy finance investors and institutions, and I suspect that they are working together to hold the price down and create pump/dump situations they can benefit from.
HIVE's liquidity on exchanges (as seen in This post today by @arcange) is low enough in relation to the total HP staked that it would take a good time for an investor to pick up enough to massively mess with the price. More importantly, apart from a few occasions by a bunch of guys reputedly in South Korea, HIVE is generally low profile enough that it's not interesting to legacy finance companies.
Growth Potential
This one's simple; growth can come one of two ways. From increases in price, and from growth in the asset itself.
As we know, price changes in crypto can be pretty ephemeral. BTC is directly manipulated by investors and by regulators spreading FUD. HIVE doesn't get so directly manipulated, but does tend to follow other altcoins as they react to BTC changes. So I'm not worried about that.
But BTC as an asset basically just sits there, the digital equivalent of a bar of gold. If I want to make it work for me, I have to give it to someone else to lend or use for liquidity, and hope they're honest enough to give it back at the end. We've seen a few cases over the last few months proving that's not always guaranteed.
HIVE on the other hand literally powers the Hive ecosystem, and has lots of wonderful ways we can make it work for us. Author rewards, curation, delegation, and even just the act of staking it as Hive Power.
In the 20-odd months I've been on Hive, I've invested about £3000 in Fiat (slowly, over quite a time !) During this time I've earned 1325 HIVE author rewards, 275 curation and 564 HBD (including interest). Even at today's depressed prices, that would convert back to around £840. That's an incredible rate of return compared to most "traditional" investments, and I don't count the authoring part of the author rewards as work, because it's fun !
Use Cases
This is related to the opportunities for growth.
BTC is, realistically, just a way to store value. When was the last time anyone bought a pizza with it ? And if you want to use it, you have to give someone else the keys and hope for the best....
HIVE, on the other hand, is the driver for a huge and growing ecosystem of Dapps, social platforms, games, video streaming services, communities and who knows what else. It's such a rapidly growing field that it would be a full time job just keeping up with the changes !
Although we're still quite low profile here in Hive-land right now, I honestly think that if there is anyone thing which will bring Web3 exploding into the public consciousness it's us.
So far we've mostly just mirrored existing Web2 functions, but in a decentralised and fairer way. But with the rapid pace of development, it's only a matter of time before someone here creates a "must have" application that the public suddenly realises it needs. Like the AI's, we're learning and improving all the time.....