Saturday Savers 2023 Progress Report Week 20

It's Saturday already ! Time for my weekly #SaturdaySavers update....

If you're not familiar with SaturdaySavers, it's a fabulous initiative run by @shanibeer writing as @sally-saver on the @eddie-earner account, where we all support each other in getting to our savings goals.

Image by Nicky ❤️🌿🐞🌿❤️ from Pixabay

To start with, here's last week's progress table;

Observations on Last Week / Next Week

As is my norm, I'm not going to go into huge detail going through the table line by line, but just comment on a couple of key trends.

EDS is still gradually clawing back the difference, gaining about 1% each week. I'm hopeful that by the end of the year I'll have hit 100% - this is very much hare & tortoise territory !

Apart from that, last week was what I'd classify as a "neutral" week. I posted a bit, and did plenty of curation and commenting (and even some threading... wooo !) But most of my attention had to be on real-world non-crypto things, so I was kind of coasting rather than making big strides. I expect the next couple of weeks will follow a similar pattern, but hopefully I'll find more time to post.

Since I seem to be spending quite a bit of time on these posts going off onto philosophical tangents, here's another one for you.....

The issue this time is;

Hive's Greatest Strength

Over the last week, a few things have happened to make me realise that most investments aren't secure. Some of it was things in the news, other parts were personal experiences.

They included;

• The news that in the US, Janet Yellen said she expected more bank mergers to be necessary. It's very clear that the US authorities are trying very hard to consolidate all the local banks into one or two national mega-banks. This eliminates consumer choice, and gives them huge control over the money - I guess it'll make forcing a compulsory CBDC much easier. If some people lose their money during the consolidation process, the authorities appear to be happy to see it happen.

• Ledger's announcement of a recovery protocol as a chargeable service. Sounds nice until you look deeper and realise it means they (and by extension, governments and banks) had a back-door way to access your crypto all along. So what I thought was a secure way to hold crypto in cold storage turns out to be no safer than leaving it on an exchange.

• I went into the bank this week to re-activate a dormant ISA (a UK-type savings account). It took jumping through many hoops to do it, and I left with the strong impression that the bank hated the idea that I might want control over what I thought was my money, and what they thought was theirs.

The common theme with each of these is that banks, governments, regulators and similar bodies all think that they own the money, and that ordinary people like you and I are just allowed to use it temporarily and only by their sufferance.

If we look at crypto, the vast majority of coins and tokens actually appear to have a significant level of centralisation.

It might be a project where the team behind it allocate a majority of tokens to themselves or to a central reserve that they control.

Or it might be a nominally decentralised altcoin where control is actually in the hands of a "foundation" which operates as a closed clique with close control over the direction of the project (Algorand is a good example of this).

Even Bitcoin is very blatantly subject to manipulation by whales and corporate level traders (I hesitate to call them investors !)

Now let's compare all this with Hive by looking at the risks, starting at high level and working downwards;

• Governments, banks or regulators taking control of Hive. With no CEO and witnesses scattered around the world, this would require a massive international effort, and a disproportionate enforcement effort for something they'd see as a social media network a fraction of the size of Facebook or Twitter.

• Hive being blocked by government-decreed internet censorship. It's possible that governments could block Hive by ordering search engines to hide it and ISP's to prevent traffic crossing borders. Although they aren't 100%, that's what VPN's are for !

• Governments or banks taking our HIVE. Theoretically possible if they can compromise our devices, but hard to do, unlikely to be worth the effort and unlikely to be applied globally. The unstaking mechanism for Hive Power makes this even harder.

• Banks and centralised exchanges blocking fiat purchases of HIVE. This would slow growth in the short term, but wouldn't touch the HIVE already in the system. The crypto community is hugely inventive so I'm confident workarounds would appear in no time.

• Price manipulation by external investors or organisations. Although we've seen a few brief spikes, reputedly driven by Korean investors, with so few exchanges trading it it can be hard to onboard fiat to Hive. This would make it hard for an external predatory trader to become dominant or regularly manipulate the price. The price of HIVE is actually relatively stable compared to most other crypto's (including BTC).

• Losing our keys. Probably the biggest risk, either if we lose the paper copy of our keys or if our devices are compromised. But (without being harsh) that is our own responsibility !

So all in all, Hive's biggest strength is that we genuinely own it ourselves. That makes me happy :)

Posted Using LeoFinance Alpha