I've been dealing with crypto for more than 10 years now. While it was the far west in the early stages with plenty of scams but also plenty of ways to earn crypto, the situation has changed.
For the Liotes project, I started an experiment where we asked our community to join several established crypto earning sites. After a week of quite intense activity, the results were pretty meagre. With more than 10 people who claimed from faucets and watched ads on 4 different websites, the income generate was almost ridiculously low.
We then asked for a feed-back and there is one sentence that I would like to point out:
There is nothing out there that is better than Hive
(by @seckorama)
One single post on hive can easily outstrip the earnings of what the whole community earned during one week on these paid to click sites.
In the past, I had plenty of income streams over many different platforms but many of these income streams have dried out and the only real income that is worth mentioning nowadays for me comes from hive.
Is it good or bad for hive to be able to provide a return for people?
We have to keep in mind that it's possible to earn on several levels on hive. You earn staking rewards just for powering up your hive. You earn curation rewards if you upvote content. Then you earn also author rewards if you write posts.
What we have to keep in mind is that these earning possibilities, together with others that should be mentioned like witness rewards or DHF payouts, come from a growing supply. This means that what we earn is actually nothing else than newly minted tokens. However, more tokens in circulation are also diluting the value of the existing tokens.
If everybody sees hive to provide an income, then most of the people will cash out their earnings and this will tip the balance between offer and demand. If the number of people on hive doesn't increase together with the supply of hive, and if people don't lock hive at the same speed, then it's probable that the value of hive will slowly go down over time.
The scaling effect
What is great about hive is that you can generate an income but even better is that you can scale your income. When writing, you can only generate so many posts per week and if you exaggerate, then probably you will also feel it. I would say that the earning potential from creating content is limited. However, when you start to accumulate hive and stake it, you will reach a point where you actually earn more from staking and curation rewards than you do from author rewards.
The potential income that hive can generate is not really limited towards the top. The more hive is staked, the less hive is in circulation. So staking more hive is a very good answer to keep a stable price.
More users, more demand
Of course, the best solution to keep the value of hive up is to make sure that more people join the fun. The fact that hive allows to earn an income is actually quite a powerful argument to attract more people. If these people learn that they can scale their income by staking hive, we could quickly go towards a situation where the price tendency is reversed.
Some losing hope, others waiting in the shadows
There is in my opinion a feeling surrounding hive where there are a lot of players who lost their hopes about hive and they jump ship, sell their stake and this of course has an important impact on the price of hive. However, there are also a lot of people who see lower prices as a chance to grab more hive. In the long term, I believe it's this second group that will change the dynamic of the chain in the future. It will take some time to get there. I believe that this group will little by little impose new things like maybe a shift of witnesses. There are quite a lot of top witnesses that don't do much for the chain. Then there is the problematic around the DHF that many see as being exploited. I'm sure that many who are optimistic about hive want this to change...
The more the hive price drops, the easier it will be for new actors to come forward and bring fresh ideas and energy to the chain. So lower prices are maybe not necessarily bad.
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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