Crypto is all about decentralization and trust, but it is even more about compromises, tradeoffs, and emergent open-source infrastructure. What works? What doesn't work? What has staying power?
DPOS flaws
Every consensus algorithm has flaws and attack vectors. Hive has plugged a lot of holes in the past few years; ones that other networks haven't had to deal with yet. Look at Solana in the top 10 by market cap; a DPOS "competitor". Just the other day it crashed for like what? 24 hours? Yeah, that's not acceptable for a lot of users. Growing pains will continue to be severe.
The biggest flaw DPOS has is a centralized token distribution. Perhaps that's the biggest flaw of every crypto in existence. Hive has good mechanics to continue decentralizing and bringing new users in. If Hive had as many users as Myspace (40M) we'd be doing fantastic. When a single app like Splinterlands can start bringing in 10k users a day we see where this is going.
RC Pools are now the #1 priority.
When we got attacked by Justin Sun I got to see something amazing. I got to see the devs on this network get together and be like "FUCK THAT". Do you know how funny it was to watch Tron devs try to keep up with the natives? It was laughable. They got destroyed even with the ridiculous controlling stake that was sold to them by a traitor.
In any case, we have to expect that Hive is about to get a whole lot more users, which means delegating Hive is no longer a suitable or secure way to onboard. We must have RC Pools.
RC pools
With RC pools any account has access to Hive bandwidth as long as they have access to a pool. A lot of these dapp operators are going to want to give their users free service. This is what most Web 2.0 noobs are going to expect. We can't get mass adoption without it. Free service is the catalyst.
Can Bitcoin offer free service? No. Ethereum? Good luck. Hive is the only network out there that yield farms bandwidth and inflation combined with a primitive social media frontend. However, every frontend is a skin, and there will be hundreds of them in the future.
- leofinance.io
- peakd.com
- proofofbrain.io
- hive.blog
- Splinterlands
Anyone can build a frontend for Hive and turn it into whatever they want. Doesn't even have to be social media. Video games are quite popular. Don't be surprised when Hive gets overrun by porn and there's nothing we can really do about it. Sex sells itself, and the only thing required to transact on Hive are the private keys and the Resource Credits. We don't get to pick and choose who uses the network. That's the entire point.
How did I get on this tangent?
I really need to buy some more LEO. This is getting a bit out of control for my Hive stack to be like 10x bigger than my LEO stack. Luckily my stake in CUB kind of gets rolled into LEO because of the obvious connections.
CUB is a slave to LEO
On a governance level, LEO controls CUB in a lot of respects. It's unclear how governance will evolve, as the governance token airdrop won't happen for a while.
DPOS is a superior form of Republic governance. Money wins elections; might as well cut out the middle man and vote directly with the money itself. All voting stake must be locked in the 13 week contract, so those who want to participate in governance have to throw down and have a lot of skin in the game. This makes votes impossible to counterfeit, because crypto is impossible to counterfeit. It's a superior system that keeps getting slammed by the naysayers who don't have a better solution. In fact, the naysayers often have zero solutions and just complain about problems.
It becomes clear that because CUB is not built on a DPOS network, building governance for CUB on BSC is redundant and inferior. Any votes would obviously be cast with LEO or the governance token we have planned.
This is the ultimate statement that proves that CUB is in servitude to LEO. Look how much inflation CUB gives LEO for free. What does LEO do for CUB? Nothing. What does CUB do for LEO? 12x inflation to a pool that creates liquidity not only for LEO, but also the decentralized liquidity bridge to other networks.
Still this is an equitable relationship, as CUB devs and LEO devs are one and the same. The lines are blurred and the communities are blended. That may not always be the case.
However, it's easy to see that imperialism can be adapted to crypto, and probably will be eventually. Once we decentralize the legacy economy and scale up society to new levels of greatness, it would be foolish to think that we wouldn't run into other scaling walls going forward.
It would also be foolish to think that tribalist communities within the cryptoverse wouldn't try to control other such communities. Why would crypto be any different? People are people, and they want more power above all else a lot of the time. LEO controls CUB, and that's fine for now. No one is complaining. But what happens when one community tries to exert its authority on another?
It's hard to even imagine how that might go down because the infrastructure for that currently doesn't exist. If it did central banks would no longer exist. That's how you know we've made it. No more central banks. No more USD. Gone... poof. This is not a future we can easily speculate on. Soonest that can happen is one or two decades. Probably more like three or four, but you never know when exponential advances are in play.
Conclusion
This post is a mashup between a couple weird ideas I have swirling around. It definitely needs more explanation. Maybe some other time.
The main point I'm trying to make is that it's not absurd to think that Hive votes could control the actions of many different frontends built upon Hive, and perhaps even on frontends not built on Hive. Communities will try to exert their power within the cryptoverse just like people try to exert their power within the legacy economy.
The most important question:
What are you going to worry about when you aren't worrying about money? Freedom awaits. Or is it just more slavery? The more things change, the more they stay the same.