What Hive Already Has After Two Years and What Hive Still Needs?

It seems incredible, but yes, two days from now, on March 20th, Hive will be 2 years old. That is if we count from the split time, otherwise it will be around 6 years old.

I thought this is the perfect moment to look at Hive from two perspectives. What are already its strengths, and where things could be improved going forward, in my opinion.

Let's start with the strengths.

1. Fast and Free Transactions

While there are blockchains faster than Hive, I believe a 3 second period for producing new blocks is very fast. Faster than that, and it would create issues synchronizing nodes while preserving things decentralized and with servers all over the world.

There are of course options which make these operations even faster. Hive Application Framework (HAF) improves the speed of older data retrieval from the blockchain by keeping it in a regular database, and it is an easier programming interface for any developer with SQL knowledge. And it's not all HAF does, but I simplified things.

Free transactions. This is technically not true, because transactions cost resource credits. And to have resource credits (RC) you need HIVE Power staked. That is until the next hard fork which will come very soon, and which will allow RCs to be delegated in a similar manner as HIVE Power. That is a very important evolution, because there are many accounts with not enough RCs and enough accounts which have plenty of them and which never use more than a fraction of them.

The difference between RCs and 'classical' transaction fees, is that RCs regenerate over time. While if you pay transaction fees that have a monetary value, once you pay them they are gone. On Hive, your resource credits simply replenish because you hold HIVE Power. The more HP you hold (or you have delegated to you), the more RCs you have.

2. Scalability

A serious amount of time has been spent by the core blockchain development team on improving scalability of Hive and fixing potential bottlenecks.

Last year, Splinterlands' major adoption wave happened, which revealed another bottleneck. That was fixed as well. While the gameplay of Splinterlands is not on Hive (for the most part - quest custom jsons are), the marketplace is, and that includes the primary and secondary marketplaces and rental marketplaces too. And those are quite busy too.

We have been for enough time in the top 5 blockchains by activity in the crypto sphere. Currently on the 4th position neck to neck with Tron. I'm sure we could take 3rd spot, but why push it now? We will take it anyway eventually and stay there.

I was curious since I was on blocktivity to see how the previous blockchain is doing. Well, it's nowhere to be found. I even found BLURT on the second page...

@blocktrades talked about the scalability of Hive on a number of occasions. I don't think I can find them right now, but I'm sure I remember him saying Hive could easily scale at least 10x in activity without running into serious growing pains.

3. Community

While I've started with the tech side, it's community which makes Hive what it is. Much of the tech (at least #1) was there on the previous blockchain, but as soon as the community migrated to Hive, that went into oblivion.

As people started to say, while Hive-Engine or DLUX are layer 2, Hive core blockchain is layer 1, and the community is layer 0. And those proved to be true on a number of occasions. The best of which was the battle fought, but inevitably lost because of the involvement of exchanges on the previous blockchain.

I said community, as Hive community, and that makes sense. But otherwise another strong point is that Hive supports the diversity of communities and the easiness for anyone to create a new community at a very low cost.

On top of that, at layer 2, Hive-Engine supports tokenized communities they call tribes.

4. Centralized Control Resistance, Censorship Resistance

Hive was given birth as a resistance to the abusive takeover of the previous chain, facilitated by the use of major stakes in ways they shouldn't have been used.

Hive is now resistant to such attacks because of multiple reasons:

• there is no entity holding a significant stake of HIVE Power
• measures were taken to prevent newly powered up HIVE from influencing governance (for 30 days), enough time for the community to react
• there is no single entity behind Hive core development and there is Hive Development Fund (DHF), a decentralized fund which can be used to hire developers if needed
• network is being secured by 20 top witnesses and about 80 backup witnesses all over the world
• witnesses can be voted in or out of their positions at any time and if stakeholders don't make any governance updates for a year, their votes are reset to prevent long-time inactive users to keep voting
• there is a relatively low cost of running a Hive node, which makes it very unlikely to run into the situation of the blockchain halting because there is no one to produce blocks

Regarding censorship resistance, it exists at the blockchain level. At the front ends level, each front end has its own policies and it may be forced at some points to take down content from their interfaces. The content will still exist on the blockchain and it will remain accessible, but not as easily for not technical individuals. Of course other interfaces can pop up to show only content that is being taken down from the main front ends, for example. As long as these interfaces are not easy to take down, it's a way to facilitate access to such content.

5. Development Keeps Happening. People Keep Joining.

The two main factors to continue to have a thriving ecosystem is to have continued development and to have new people joining on a regular basis.

We know the number of active people on Hive tends to fluctuate with the price of HIVE. Which is contrary to what should happen, but the more this is explained, the less it seems to get into people's heads.

Over time, on any platform, some people stop using it forever or for a very long time. That's why it is critical to keep bringing in new people just to keep the same number of active accounts.

To grow these numbers, something like Splinterlands and Leofinance needs to happen. Or big names coming to Hive with their communities and / or their followers.

The problem with that seems to always be the amount of existing account claims to onboard an entire community. And right now few understand Hive accounts are worth much more than the cost one pays to get it (not free). Maybe this mentality will change the more issues people face or hear about on the traditional social media sites.

There's a lot of development on Hive that we should be excited of.

There is Splinterlands and Leofinance with what they are doing. There is 3Speak with SPK Network and Ragnarok (well, this is more Dan's child than 3Speak's), there are quite a few other new games being developed on Hive currently and I already lost their track - one can only choose something of interest and keep following, but following everything is difficult.

There is DLUX by @disregardfiat and applications that will little by little be launched on it. There's HAF I already mentioned at #1 and its application HAFAH, and the one with a similar acronym HAS by @arcange, but which is more like a Hive Keychain for mobile (not only that).

Of course, Hive-Engine (and its more advanced interface TribalDex) keep getting improved. One thing that was a major step forward lately was the introduction of diesel pools (on TribalDex, not on Hive-Engine), which represents the TribalDex version of the two-asset liquidity pools from the defi world.

And of course we have the Decentralized Hive Fund which can be used to fund development, and sometimes other ventures.

I'm sure I forgot many others. But these alone can give a picture of a vibrant ecosystem.

What Does Hive Still Need?

HIVE and HBD related

If you watch the @hiveio account, you know HIVE and HBD recently got a new use case by being included as purchase options on a retail website.

More use cases for HIVE and HBD is of course something we need. If they are external to Hive, even better, because that works as publicity too.

Also, both HIVE and HBD, but especially the latter, need more listings. That happened too for HIVE, but something like Coinbase would probably do wonders.

Centralized exchanges aside, both HIVE and HBD need some liquidity pools in the AMM world, with decent liquidity, outside the Hive ecosystem (and a bridge back). Leofinance will eventually help with that, because there is a plan to link LeoBridge to Hive-Engine/Hive.

Change of Discourse

This is something I already see happening a lot. Instead of seeming like Hive maximalists shilling, it's better to focus on promoting various apps on Hive. The underlying layer is important, but not to the average user who we generally target. Luckily now people promote Splinterlands, Leofinance, PolyCub, 3Speak, PeakD, Listnerds. I rarely see them say "Come join Hive!".

I'm not sure how many players on Splinterlands do even know they have a Hive account. Or how many on LeoFinance who joined using a web2 social media account.

Yes, that process can probably be improved, so that once they joined and they became active, to be an incentive for them to claim their Hive account sooner rather than later. And this way they learn they have a Hive account and what is that good for.

More Humble

We know we have a great ecosystem and that sometimes we have solved issues others struggle to solve and probably never will.

I don't particularly like when we keep bragging about it and looking with an air of superiority to others (usually much bigger) who still have issues and nominate them directly.

Not because we aren't correct in many cases, but because that does us a disservice. They certainly won't appreciate it, and even if they don't reply directly, if they have a say at some point about Hive's future, partnerships etc. they might say no, and their influence will count more than ours.

Sometimes it pays off to be a diplomat. Maybe we would have been in a more favorable position now on the partnerships/interoperability and listings front, if this would have been on our minds (including mine).

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Since Hive's anniversary is on Sunday and I publish my weekly progress reports then, this is my post dedicated to the occasion. I wish I'll be just as happy, or even more to write an anniversary post when Hive will be 10 years old. Happy Anniversary Hive!

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta