Is Hive an Ethereum Killer?

According to the interwebs the only thing you need to be an Ethereum killer is cheaper gas fees then ETH. Hive wins in a landslide with ZERO transaction fees that are infinitely cheaper than Ethereum's.

Yeah. "Hive is definitely *THE* Ethereum killer. GAME OVER. 
No reason to talk about this anymore." 

Serious. Let's talk about why this might actually be the case and how we can beat the alternatives feature for feature.

To actually have an Ethereum killer you have to be better at what they do then they are. Not just marginal better but orders of magnitude better. We are talking 10x - 100x better to actually have a shot of killing what you seek to replace. Let's look at how Hive stacks up to ETH, and it's competition.

Smart contracts

Smart contracts were the thing that set Ethereum apart when it first came out. It is also a feature every ETH Killer has to have. Here is a high level overview of how gas fees are calculated is as follows the final transaction fee is the number of operations in that contract times the gas fee.

16 Gwei ($0.40) * 50 Ops = 800 Gwei ($20)

This is what really makes transactions for DEFI, NFTs or other smart contact actions so damn expensive compared to simple transfer of ETH. Even the simple transfer fee is affected by the smart contracts hosted on the Ethereum Network.

It does this by encouraging users of smart contracts into a bidding war to get into the next block on the chain. The more Gwei bid the faster miners will pick up their transactions and add it to the chain and that drives up the average gas fee for everyone. That makes smart contacts a real issue for Ethereum.

Hive is a different animal in a couple of way that matter. I already told you there are no transactions fee on Hive, but that is a lie.

You lied to me? 

Well, that is kind of a lie too. You simply have to hold staked Hive (Hive Power) to have Resource Credits(RCs) used to pay for transactions on the blockchain. These RCs regenerate overtime and don't reduce your holdings of Hive Power. So... there are no fees on transactions. Okay. Alright.

There are no smart contracts built into the Hive blockchain. That is a good thing. This chain does one thing really well. Storing text. We use it for everything. Everything From simple transfers of HIVE all the way up to smart contracts data.

But, you said we don't have smart contracts.

Of course, we have smart contracts, even Bitcoin has smart contracts now at Layer 2 (or is it Layer 1.5?) Taproot though I have yet to actually see any Dapps using them.

Hive has many smart contract services they are just all on Layer 2. The main ones are Hive Engine (contracts available to the public), Splinterlands (private smart contracts that power the game), Honeycomb (build your own layer2 and contracts), and HIVE Application Framework (HAF)(as yet unreleased Layer 1.5 that simplifies data access).

We are more flexible than most blockchains when it comes to smart contracts. Ethereum and it's EVM clones have Solidity. Since our contracts are at Layer 2 we can support writing them in any programming language. When combined with HAF the amount of programmers available that can work on our blockchain will explode exponentially.

How Hive Wins

We are one of the few blockchains that incentivize anything other than securing the chain itself: social activities like posts, comments and a portion of the inflation goes to these people as well as the witnesses that secure the chain. We win by continuing to incentivize things we want and need to survive, as a community. SPK Network is a part of this incentivization movement. They do this but tokenizing the work necessary to encode videos and prove that files are being stored.

Have a favorite sports team or think acupuncture is the shit. Start a Breakaway Community. Give your community its own token and incentives to do the things you care about: posting, filing info about players, or just commenting. These tokenomics encourage these communities to contribute and profit from those contributions.

Some communities that already do this: Click. Track. Profit., ListNerds, and Hive Pizza Guild. Everytime we make a new censorship resistant community that is the real win.

The End

So, are we an Ethereum Killer? Yes, but not in ways they will see until we swallow them whole. Go and Incentivize the things you care about. I F*#%ing Double Dog Dare.