It has been a while...
For any of you following me at all, you know my life has been up and down for the last year or so. Recently, I was allowed to have time to devote back to crypto. I have about 5 hours a day that I can focus on crypto and since I have that time available, I figured I should devote some of that to my home... #HIVE
But where have you been?
Even though I have not been very active in the crypto space, I have still been paying attention to what is going on, and I know that no one here has been asleep to what has been going on with Solana. The mass adoption that all chains are looking for has been taking off in the Solana ecosystem, all the way to them launching their phone, and now even version 2 of the same phone!
So what did you do, boss?
Well, I decided to get in over there. I had about a thousand dollars that I could use just sitting on Coinbase, so I decided to get into Solana, and let me tell you, there has been good and bad along the way! First, and foremost, the place is FULL of scams! Everywhere you look there is a new token dropping, and the FOMO is everywhere! Presales are often nothing, and at times even when you do get the token, it never gets released to trade, so you are left with dead tokens in your wallet. Once again, a person is left doing tons of research trying to find that diamond in the rough...
But what are they doing that Hive is not?
Well, the one thing I see over on Sol that I no longer see on Hive, are large X and social media pushes. Hive tends to stick with Hive posts for information, and do not get me wrong, Hive is probably the best place to get information anywhere on any subject, but if only Hivians see it, how does that promote growth? One thing that Hive desperately needs is attention. If no one knows something is there, how can it succeed?
Eases of access
Another thing that I see Solana doing exceptionally well is ease of access. Buying Sol is straightforward, whereas Hive can at times be difficult, and sometimes impossible to buy depending on your country of origin. Throw in the DEXs like Bittrex and Blocktrades either going under, or not serving certain countries, and that compounds the problem. Believe me, I get that Hive is very diverse, but something must be done, not to centralize, but to integrate.
Backups...
Now, I am no tech guru, at all, I am simply a nerd who likes crypto and is intrigued by the possibilities it offers. For example, I minted an NFT on the #WAX ecosystem once, that had an endangered animal photo, with the genetic code of the animal embedded into the IPFS file that accompanied it. How is that for innovation? Likely a little ahead of my time though. But what about backups?
What do you mean?
Several times now, I have seen games on Hive disappear. Ocean Planet, CryptoBrewMaster, and a few others fell victim to war. The servers, according to what I understand, were bombed in the Ukraine / Russia war. I will address the political stuff here in a while, but for now, let me focus on the fact that a bomb in one country took out an entire crypto ecosystem because the assets were on servers that were destroyed. What can Hive do about this? It does not have to be a bomb, if this is true, power outages and natural disasters can also impact crypto on Hive, and to me, this is a very pressing issue that needs addressed. Perhaps a community server network, spread across many countries?
Politics...
Now I get to be me. I know there are people in the Hive space that are "Maxis." Hell, "maxis" are everywhere. The thing is though, being a maxi in one space kind of makes you blind to issues in your space. Think #ETH and the whole "When they fix the gas fees" narrative. The thing is, there is a thing called "wormhole" and again, I am not a tech guy like that at all, but apparently the idea is to integrate all blockchains through this Wormhole Maybe you guys are all reading this and thinking, "Psh! This noob! We already know all this!" and that is fine. I am just offering my opinion and insights based on what I have seen. What I have seen, and know for a fact is this. Integration is coming, and the idea that "One blockchain will rule them all" is idiotic thinking at this point, mass adoption and use of crypto should be the ideal being worked for by everyone.
But, muh Reputation!
The thing about Hive that I have always loved, from way back during the early #Steemit days, was the fact that I could long-form write and earn for it. I went to school to be behind the camera for a reason, but in writing, I feel like I can truly speak my mind, and MAYBE someone will listen. If that is the case, listen. Hive has one other issue I can see. Reputation is not being used to weigh the posts. That means that if someone steadily posts good thoughts and voted content, it does not mean it will get traction. Like all social media, popularity is what makes trending posts a lot of the time. Reputation score, in my opinion, should be used for this.
Other chains...
So as I have said, I have gotten involved in the Sol ecosystem. The meme coins, NFTs, and innovation going on over there are awesome, and it is looking like Solana is going to be the Walmart of crypto. You have #BTC and ETH, the JC Pennys or something, then you have all these other cryptos trying to be Walmart - Mass adoption. The question is, where will Hive be? Are we going to be like the Dollar Tree cryptos? WAX and others? No? What are we going to do about it then? Hive is special and very important, what are WE going to do to see her thrive?
Decentralized...
Remember those comments about the war? That is why Hive needs to have a dog in this fight. For me, I am going to make the vow, yet again, to write here as often as I can now that I have some time to do so. Sometimes, I might write tin foil hat stuff, sometimes it will be like this, and sometimes, it might be pictures of my dog or food, that is what makes Hive great! You can make a niche if it is not there, and build a community around it. The question is, where is the onboarding? Really? Solana has "Launchpads" that have an ecosystem that revolves around helping other people launch their projects there for pay, either a cut of the project or cash. Where is that on Hive? We need to fix that.
So again...
What are you going to do? I am going to hold myself to write. I am also going to do something I DO NOT EVER DO. I am going to tag some people in this post. Please understand I do not do this lightly, I just really want to see things on Hive continue to thrive for everyone! I think some of these ideas need to be looked at. For example, if you go to the Hive main page, the game Hashkings is no longer able to be played. I have seen games on that page that are dead for months before they are removed. I get it, decentralized, but there has to be some way to form a Hive DAO and make sure that things are getting done ecosystem-wide that will benefit everyone. I think that the people I tag in this will either get very very mad at me, or they will read what I have written and maybe agree with some of it, and hopefully implement some of these changes.
I mean a racecar is cool and all, but if they go to the homepage and find games that they can't even access, and a difficult onboarding experience, who cares about the car?
On second thought, I won't tag anyone...
No one really cares unless it benefits them, right?
