Fictional storyline and characters. But who knows?
Premises: Why bother managing your own crypto wallets? It's difficult, and if you lose your keys you lose your crypto! Entrust us with your cryptocurrencies! We make it easy for you to access them and exchange them, and when you want them back you can have them.
Who are we? The centralized exchanges, of course!
In private: Now that we have the fools' crypto, let's get rich because we are savvy and they are stupid. We know how to make a huge profit, and they just sit on their crypto doing nothing.
How do you propose to do that?
Let's do leverage trading using their crypto!
Isn't that risky? What if it backfires?
Are you stupid? What could go wrong? If it works, we'll become gods of this space! If it doesn't, it's not our crypto!
Exactly! Not our crypto! We need to pay it back.
Are you worrying about the plebs' crypto now? We'll just pay it back using the crypto from other plebs.
But what if there's not enough?
No more buts! There's always enough! We will be gods, comprende?
Count me out!
Your loss! More for me.
...
Sometime later: We're in deep shit! We have to stop withdrawals because we can't pay these idiots. I bet our competitor has his hand in this. On top of this, our leverage trades are in deep red and always need more collateral.
Correction: You are in deep shit! I got out, remember?
Moral of the story: Trust is overrated. Take ownership of your own crypto, at least!
I hope you enjoyed my amateurish story. It's... trendy, at least. :)
The moral of the story is important. Let me repeat it: Trust is overrated. Take ownership of your own crypto, at least!
In line with this conclusion of the story, there is something that can make the Hive ecosystem more trustless.
And that is the multisig option that Hive supports for some time, but isn't used as much in practice.
Part of the reason why I believe it isn't used more is that we lack a tool that will make it easier to use, particularly because multisig transactions require a level of coordination between the key holders who need to sign within a given timeframe, or they expire.
The multisig option is not very interesting for the regular user of Hive (although I've seen a potential use case as a 2FA which can be interesting for regular users too).
But some critical accounts on Hive better be multisig! What that means is to have multiple actors with their own keys to the account and no single actor can broadcast at least important transactions on its own. There are all sorts of combinations that can be created with different weights for the keys, the threshold needed, and the time by which the transactions expire.
There is currently a proposal by @stoodkev (already funded), to create a tool to make the multisig option easier to use. I bet not many knew about it. The author explains well in the text of the proposal what multisig is and what are the potential use cases, so I'm not going to repeat that.
That's another step to further decentralize Hive (as a whole, not the base layer), at a time when this seems very savvy to do.