I was going to write a different post today initially but after following a discussion by @apshamilton and @enginewitty I figured I'd give some thoughts to the matter of hive's price being paired up with steem currently.
Without diving deep down into the history of the hive fork, the lawsuit that hive stakeholders won, the garbage that Justin Sun ended up buying and then quickly dumping, let's look into what's been happening since.
Now I may be forgetting some things, so feel free to remind me in the comments in case I do.
Hive has since 2020 not had a "leader" per se, no company backing it, no real team trying to get it exchange listings and promotions. Most of this has been done by a few people/teams either pro bono or through the DHF.
The team behind @blocktrades has been working on Hive for up to 6 years now and as far as I understand at no cost to the chain, i.e. no DHF asks. While I don't personally agree with that and would hope they'd ask for backpay maybe when we're doing a bit better, it is something I come to appreciate. There's been a lot of work done to make Hive as easy and cheap as possible to be ran. This means anyone can very cheaply run a witness to keep decentralization and distribution of our ledger wide.
Off the top of my head, other things they've build: HAF, sub-second irreversibility, resource credit system and delegations, wax/beekeeper/workerbee stack, etc.
All while people like @crimsonclad have been checking for other hive listings on exchanges without doing the things every other currency out there does which is pay a heft fee to get listed and/or pay matchmaking fees to generate fake volume. And for good reason, cause most coins only exist to scam others out of their other coins.
Steem has from what I understand only had some development done to condenser since (the steemit.com website).
Now here's how I view some things.
Steem is a lot more proof of stake than proof of brain, this means that investors there do better there than they do here. Now why do I say that and what makes me sure of it? Let's take a look at @trafalgar for instance. On Hive he mainly curates, is he allowed to post? of course, but he knows/understands that when posting he'd have to rely on others to wanna support him and that the community kind of frowns upon self-votes if it's overdone. On Steem however, he posts daily and is trending daily, why? Because he delegates to a service there that gives him approximately 10x selfvotes back, meaning all of his voting power goes back towards him for maximum ROI. Here's 2 screenshots from his stake on Hive and his stake on Steem, as far as I know this is all earned since the fork and he kept both unchanged (i.e. stayed staked on both and didn't power down/power up any of them)
That big discrepency shows exactly what I'm talking about. On steem investors get most of the inflation, they do not curate. Steemit itself may have some curation initiatives because other than that everyone has probably opted for max APY which in turn means most of his daily posts are probably low effort trash posts, not like the amazing posts @trafalgar used to have when he first joined the space which i very much liked and found funny.
Think about if things worked the same here, an account like @blocktrades would be posting daily and delegating to a @gotyourbackbro vote selling service, he'd be close to 40m HP today rather than his 16m he now has. So where has all the stake gone?
To authors.
Are authors rich and can wait for prices to be higher before making decisions on selling their stake? Dunno, have you looked at the economy these last few years? Most people need money and Hive has for a fact helped a lot more people out than Steem has since 2020 as is proof with stake distribution.
Why am I mentioning this? Because stakeholders on Hive are diluted stronger than there, which can affect the price.
Not only that but we also have active development through the DHF, which Steem also has one but never uses as far as I'm aware, this means even more sell pressure of Hive compared to them.
Lastly, let's get back to the market.
I've said this a few times before, but the market doesn't know all of this because we haven't been in the limelight of any crypto attention or outside news in a long time. The Hive fork itself was one of the biggest events that occurred that got attention back on us for a few weeks, big names like Vitalik tweeting about us, Justin Sun attempting to create a false narrative as to what occurred, CZ from binance apologizing for getting "tricked" into powering up their customer's stake and disabling withdrawals due to it. Other than that @splinterlands did some big moves but from what I've come to understand didn't do much for Hive itself as most players weren't even aware they were using Hive, so it was mostly just the regulars constantly posting about the game on Hive.
Other than that, we haven't had anything big happen and have kept falling down marketcaps.
3speak didn't make any noise, vsc didn't make any noise, valueplan did make some noise in certain regions but unsure if crypto people cared about it. My own projects, Holozing failed to deliver a finished product. POSH has done good bringing in traffic but very little has resulted in account registrations or adrevenue for our front-ends.
The general crypto people first care about the solution, to them DPOS was already not on a good standing due to them seeing BTS as a failed project, then Steem, then EOS. They're not aware of our tech now because most of those crowds never looked back. Others are either too focused building on the giant chains cause they have foundations, core companies like blockstream with outside investments, a lot of speculation money and active community mostly gambling on memecoins after the nft fad died away which was also abused and misused majorly.
As sad as it is, to the outside we're just another fork of the original chain. The original chain has a more unique name and does well in terms of traffic. They're not giving out inflation easily to people and are becoming more centralized than they already were.
We're the one that stood by our vision and morals and continue to do so but that comes at a cost (exchange listings, the definition of the word curation, development through the DHF on various things).
If investors who cared about longterm investments knew about the differences and were interested in something like Hive (DPOS, inflationary) I'm 100% certain they'd look at the price of Hive today and think it's a steal to get in on compared to Steem. Even our own users should think the same thing.
What's uncertain however, is, how long will outside investors stop caring about our coins, stop treating them as has-beens or "they're probably the same" and start looking deeper into what's been happening here since the fork and start understanding the value of the attention economy as it works on Hive and what it enables in a transparent and fair way.
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