Today is the day, and its been a long time coming - The INCOME synergy curation program is done. Its over, and there is no use to cry about it. It was a fun ride, a long road, and we learned a lot along the way. The best thing is, I think everyone who has any INCOME is in the green, and its time to sell the INCOME tokens back to the program at 13 HIVE! Do it now!!
From 1 to 13
Its some what of a fun number, to imagine that we turned each 1 HIVE (from the original sale) into 13 HIVE each - we had some additional sales along the way, at 5 and at 8, and finally at 13 - if I recall correctly. This has been a community project to support the community of members. I often used the tokens, gave them away to friends and allies, as a way to mark their accounts and make sure I was supporting them as much as I could.
Of course, some people did buy them - even if the biggest of such "investor" accounts rarely posted, but they did have the opportunity to use the "reblog curation". I put this to great effect in my daily workflow and I know that users like @melinda010100 did too. This was a "best case" scenario - based on some faith in humans and community.
Alas, not every user on an "open market" used it so selflessly, and while I rarely if ever announced how it worked, it did seem like we got some "vote buyers" on the list over time, and our program had started to take some flack for that behavior. Luckily, I saw it coming "a mile away", and have been working to wind down the program - as "more trouble than its worth" for just over three months now.
This is why we can't have nice things
I surely always knew that there was "abuse" potential, we manually updated the conditions over a dozen times throughout the years - throwing out tags like actifit - and coupled with never announcing exactly how it actually worked and manually selecting many of the members ourselves and giving them the tokens; all this made me feel like it was not a vote buying program.
But literally, it could have been, or was, available for buying votes. And as I mentioned above, it seems some users who I don't know personally did buy those votes. As long as their content met the minimum standards set in secret, and they won the lottery draw (which has gotten less competitive recently since the dividends ended), they would get curated. Despite many caveats, at the end of the day, we became a vote-buying program, which is frowned upon. We might have been the most creative, unique and interesting vote buying program, but those adjectives just don't matter. The program had become more trouble than it was worth.
So its done now.
What's next?
As I have had a lot of my own HIVE tied up in this program for years now, I am actually fresh and full of optimism about redeploying the funds. I am not in a hurry, as per usually with my programs I will make sure everyone gets out before rushing away with the rest of the fund. I have learned a lot, every step of the way, and I keep learning.
Our thecrazygm.com toolbox continues to expand, and the modular legos are starting to fit together into practical solutions to really exciting things on-chain. So its likely that some of that HIVE will end up with @mithrildestiny earning me gold for our Hive-as-a-Service offerings, HSBI (with some new functionality currently in testing to share pending balance around in a much easier way) or even the newly formed @mithrilmarketing.
I have a lot of ideas, and I will keep building, together with my team and supporting our allies in their missions as well. You certainly haven't seen the last of me, even if I am still "wrapping things up" around the chain - its all about tying up loose ends and getting a fresh start with new vision on HIVE.
Any questions, ask away.