Hive was created as a new fork and alternative to Steem. Read here what all the Hive is about 👇
Short reminder:
- Steemit was founded by Dan Larimer (the mind behind Bitshares, Steem, Eos, Voice)
- Larimers intention was to build a reddit competitor on the blockchain
- Steem the blockchain is based on delegated Proof-of-Stake (dPOS)
- Larimer left Steemit in 2017 to his Co founder Ned Scott
- During 2018/19 Steemit lost thousands of users
- Ned Scott sold Steemit to Justin Sun
- Justin Sun has overtaken the Steem Chain by using token from exchanges to vote his own witnesses
- The Steem community hard forked Steem by creating a new Blockchain (Hive)
The Justin Sun Move
I am a long term Steem-user and called the move of Justin Sun in December 2019
“what can Sun lose when he does not buy Steem(it)? Steemit right now, is the center of the Steem universe. Steem itself has roughly 5-7.5k daily active >>unique<< users (hard to estimate). According to the metcalfe network formula (value ~ n²), yielding a potential value of 25-50 Million USD for the whole system. So the market does quite well calculate the intrinsic value of the network (not more, not less)…
So in itself it is quite valuable just because of the user-base and so are the few startups around Steem. The biggest problem Sun has to solve is that in February VOICE will launch its beta.
Now when Sun buys Steem(it) there is the following problem:
- destroying Steemit or even the game mechanics of the Steem chain (which is not impossible) would kill the competition which Steem is, which would be a gift to Dan and Block.One.
- pumping capital into Steemit.Inc and the head developer team would benefit Steem but it also would bring Sun return, which is kind of a hedge.
- doing nothing…well would probably end in favor of Block.one
–> so he would be better off buying Steemit.Inc as an investor.“
What I did not foresee was the possibility of a successful ecosystem split!
The Ecosystem Split – threat and opportunity
Now ecosystem splits are complicated, they can result in a net destruction of value on both sides, because each side ens up with less users. The other possibility is that the fork results in a new and better ecosystem and gains more and more in value.
Hive was initiated by the previous Steem witnesses. The token balances are the same we had on Steem (Airdrop), except for the Steemit- and exchange stake which was bought and used by Justin Sun.
The hard-fork has not drawn mass-attention but important intention to Steem/Hive:
Steem could have been a success – maybe HIVE will
Steemit.com was a top 3000 Website in the worldwide ranking, it has shown good SEO rankings for the users content and unfortunately lost this position and all the attention due to the bear market but also due to mismanagement.
Now, is the dPOS mechanism still useful?
- I mean it was compromised by Justin Sun (if justified or not is nothing I can judge).
- even before Sun came along, the chain had heavy centralization issues (study).
- dPOS is not a cryptographically secured consensus mechanism
In my opinion it is!
- users still stick to it (free market)
- When it is compromised it does not break immediately (pending state)
- It can adapt to obvious threats
- The consensus-process is stripped of Merkle-proofs and cryptography but is practically the best crypto-substitute we have right now.
- It helps us understand the dynamics of ecosystems (see Vitalik Buterins reaction)
Further information
- https://hive.blog/ – The new front-end
- https://peakd.com/ – alternative (in my opinion better front-end)
- https://signup.hive.io/ – Account creation
- https://hive.io/wallets – Wallet
- https://hiveblocks.com/ – Block-Explorer for the HIVE Blockchain
- https://hive.io/ – official website
- https://hiveblocks.com/witnesses – HIVE Witnesses
The article is not about the token or investment, it is about the free-speech platforms. The rely valuable part are the experiences we get from those amazing experiments. Share your thoughts below.