As you all know, I am not a developer. It is a skill I have a lot of respect for and knew right away it was not something in my deck of cards to play. Which is fine, I rather not end up like Jack. I want to master my craft.
All of the Hive I have, I am in profit. I believe my avg buyin for my STEEM was around 50 cents, give or take, I almost bought the top in 2017 & I laddered down the entire 2018/19 bear from a high of 4.20, then 1$, then 80 cents down to 10 cents, and never looked back with all the rewards earned by staking this whole time and being in profit, that puts me in a sweet spot to just dump all of my "free" Hive coins and sail off into the sunset. But I don't. Why?
I paint this picture for you, so you know I come to you, not as some desperate underwater baghodler seeking one last exit pump, or some venture capitalist who got an insider deal from some founder who broke off a chunk of the ol' premine; no, I come to you as pure as one could. I am "free" to do as I please whenever I please.
I made a meme.
I may not know how to code, but I did research and learned all about the tech, it's like if you point to a car part, I can tell you what it is, what it does, but if you told me to build you an engine you'd be outta luck.
But one could explain to me how each part worked, what it did for the car and made it work, and that would make sense. If one suddenly said you need some pixie dust and a flamethrower to get the engine started, it would raise some red flags.
Having a high fee-base layer for the sake that everyone can run a node is pretty ludacris, it turns out to be more centralized because you simply push infrastructure to layer 2 without an overarching incentive layer. That leads to giant web2 companies taking over as gatekeepers as we see in the current web 2.5 we are in today.
The mantra of "low fee = centralized" is very misplaced. That also goes for coin voting on PoS vs. DPoS. If you have coin voting, DPoS (on Hive) is magnitudes better than PoS in virtually every way, and I am happy to debate this topic. DPoS is very easy to get wrong, and I can give you a blanket rule for when DPoS has failed.
- If the chain has any top BPs that are crypto exchanges using custodial funds to vote for themselves.
If you have solved this issue, you have also solved many other issues and as long as the token distribution isn't centralized, you'll have a fair amount of censorship resistance.
Let's explore. Low fee can be achieved vis DPoS (Hive's version, the rest I have seen are fundamentally broken) and moving smart contracts to layer 2. PoS, where you get many nodes of varying qualities combined with layer 1 smart contracts, gives you very high fees and low performance. You'll hear "trade-offs! The bloody trade offs!" - but what are we really trading?
PoS requires you to put up significant capital to have a say in consensus on the network. This alone is a gatekeeper element locking out billions from ever participating in governance. High fees are the same, it makes the network unusable for billions of people worldwide, shutting them out from web3.
Those who do not have enough stake to join in consensus will delegate their stake to a staking pool. This inevitably leads to a handful of staking pools that control the network. Sure, the staking pools may have millions of individual stakers, but none of those tiny stakers get a say in operation, they can only withdraw, which simply gives them no voice at all.
Comparing this to DPoS on Hive, it does not take a rocket scientist to see what works best in practice. Hive handles more transactions than most top blockchains yet remains feeless, fast, and operational. While the PoS layer 1 smart contract approach has boasted high fees and high barriers to entry into governance.
Web3, to me, is distributed stake on coin voting systems. This means doing the hard work, money cannot buy this as frustrating as that part may be. No premine, No controller, Community run, and sustainable economics. The infrastructure must be disturbed, which Hive has done well, and with SPK Network, we will take that to the next level when it comes to how to incentivize what goes off-chain.
"We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure." - Moxie
The masses will always happily jump to the centralized 3rd parties for convenience. This is how it always plays out in practice, you can't change practice (human nature) you can only modify the theory.
We understand in practice a very tiny part of the population will run their own nodes, they much rather delegate that convenience. That is why PoW/PoS is dominated by large mining/staking pools. What Hive does is give the market what it wants but in a more decentralized, well packaged, and overall better way.
Voting is one of the oldest consensus methods in human history, its major flaws are not in its design, but in the avoidable corruption that takes place in practice as seen in insider sales, premines, and overall greed over decentralization.
Once the community controls the infrastructure, we are our own gatekeepers, matched with the Decentralised Hive Fund, we now have a sustainable way to pay developers to continue building the technology out. Scaling is almost paramount, and that has been the focus of Hive core since I've known them.
Nodes all can run, everyone, can participate in both the network itself and the network's consensus. Open source, no controlling actors of any kind in any part of the system, from token distribution to total infrastructure to overall node and backup node count. Long lockups on Hive combined with the month delay in voting in governance has thwarted one of the biggest threats to coin voting, exchanges using custodial funds to vote, good or bad, cannot be tolerated on any level.
Web3 is obvious when you use it. How many people on web 2.5 use the tech but do not participate in that base layer governance? I know so many Hivers, nondevs, vote for block producers that run the chain. It's unparalleled, unmatched anywhere out there. People worldwide having their say with their small stakes, but it matters. Either all votes matter or no votes matter.
All roads lead to Hive & SPK Network. Hive is an immutable backbone, the incentive tool, and SPK network, allowing anyone to provide infrastructure and get rewarded for it offchain. Now intermediaries become decentralized, cogs in the machine, if one goes down or acts up, another takes their place.