I just finished listening to episode 83 of the Community Token Talk podcast with @theycallmedan and @starkerz.
I understand they had some technical difficulties and there is a significant volume discrepancy between the two hosts, but if you can get over that and can spare 2+ hours, it's one of the episodes that is worth listening to.
Dan often finds surprisingly well-suited metaphors to describe certain situations. If people would listen without bias and with an open mind, some of those metaphors alone would trigger serious alarms in their minds about the direction we move as a society and us, as individuals.
The metaphor in the title is his from this episode. And it refers to the state of the crypto space and the direction it's moving toward - more centralization and control at the base layer and on the means of moving crypto, especially to and from the space to fiat, but also inside to a growing degree. But it can refer to many other aspects where we accept living in a cage because the door is open. Here's an example: living in a country with many issues because you can travel to other places and run into those issues rarely. What if the cage door closes and you suddenly are forbidden to travel? Wait... we had that.
The cage with the open door gives the illusion of freedom because you can freely get out of the cage and get in while the door is opened. But what will happen when the door gets slammed in front of you, with you inside the cage?
This threat is present in almost the entire crypto space. The problem is that most communities in crypto embrace centralization, ignoring warning signs, because that's how they attract capital, which prefers centralized systems.
We don't have "this issue" on Hive. Decentralized enough to keep VCs away from the base layer. But they aren't away from projects on Hive (Splinterlands).
We do have another issue particular to us. We are still highly dependent on a few CEXes and their listings of HIVE and (to a lesser degree) HBD. That's our cage door.
There are some alternatives and, others are being built as we speak.
- We have wrapped HIVE and HBD on BSC and Polygon, thanks to the Leo team
- SPS from Splinterlands can also be found on BSC and Ethereum and on a series of CEXes
- LEO has its wrapped versions on BSC, Ethereum and Polygon
- There are wrapped versions of major coins on Hive-Engine, but liquidity is low
- There is v4v.app, the option to exchange HIVE/HBD to bitcoin on the Lightning Network (and back), via the node and sats liquidity provided by @brianoflondon (for small transfers)
Dan and Matt (and the devs) have been talking for a while about creating a decentralized way to move HIVE to bitcoin. Work is in progress, as far as I know, but haven't paid attention to details yet.
Once we have that, a decentralized connection between HIVE and bitcoin, plus all the connections of bitcoin to everything else and the fact it was declared not a security, we would have made sure this door doesn't close in our faces either.
What doors should we pay attention to next?