The News

The big news in the cryptosphere is that Coinbase got hacked. I saw it reported by @mrosenquist and also by the SEC. This does not seem to compromise funds, but they have leaked personal information of users, including ID images. It may have been an inside job. Any company that is holding such data needs to be really careful and it looks like their systems were not secure enough. People are often the weak point.

Bitcoin went up a little this week and other coins followed. $HIVE is doing slightly better now, but is a long way off previous highs. It ranks around 400th on Coingecko and 300th on CoinMarketCap. You can upvote it on both of those.

I often think about why Hive is not getting adopted more. We know it works and that it can be fun, but negative images of cryptocurrency can hold us back. We need to be able to counter that. Here are some points that come to mind:

• Blockchain is wasteful! Well some of them consume huge amounts of power. Hive does not since each witness node can be fairly low powered as it is not doing proof of work. Our witnesses are picked by the community and so those who bring value ought to do well. Yes, I know that a few accounts have a lot of control, but many others are growing and spreading the vote.
• Cryptocurrencies are Ponzi schemes! Those who say this may not understand what a Ponzi scheme is or how cryptocurrencies work. In the case of Hive you do not have to buy anything to get started, although there may be a small cost to getting the account to start with (with free options). Anyone has the potential to earn something.
• Blockchains have no real applications! I have been on plenty of centralised platforms that were shut down by the owning companies. Google have a bad record for this. Some people think the Fediverse offers a solution, but you will still depend on someone running a server unless you have the resources to host an instance yourself. A blockchain does not have this single point of failure. Hive has hundreds of witnesses, although a fair few are no longer active. As long as we have some the data is safe. We do need some nodes as well to serve the data, but there is redundancy there too. A blockchain offers certainty in identity too as it is not possible to pose as someone else unless you can get control of their keys. We get impersonation accounts, but you can see from their history if they are real.

Hive is not perfect, but it offers an alternative to corporate platforms that can censor you. How you counter anti-crypto opinions?

Friday Follows

• @meno is doing a great job of recruiting new users in Ecuador. He is sharing their posts, so check them out. I assume that some of these people know each other anyway, so they can work together.
• @louis88 works on tools for Hive and implemented a way to show 'KE' shores in PeakD. This indicates if a person is taking out most of their earnings. Since then @peakd have added it to the profile page.
• @risingstargame has a list of tutorials. The game has expanded a lot and new players will need some help.
• I was recently part of a discussion with @hivetoday on how Hive can benefit musicians. The recording is out now. The hosts were @buttcoins and @shadowspub with @ravenmus1c and @meno (him again) as fellow guests.

The Dog House

If you are spamming comments around Hive then you are likely to get downvoted and/or muted, so your rubbish will not be seen. We have quite good mechanisms for dealing with abuse so to continue is a waste of effort. It seems that some people never get the message...

The End

How do you think 2025 is going for Hive? I think we have some nice new developments going on. There are new games and the old ones keep innovating. I cannot keep up with all the developments, but I monitor the feeds and see what @gadrian puts in his weekly reports. We need to share the news around and highlight the users who are creating valuable content, especially if they are underappreciated. Each of us can do something to make Hive better.

Hive five!

The man behind:

@tenkminnows: Helping good Hivers level up @proofofbrian: A bot that checks for tag typos #BritList: A monthly list of Hivers in the UK