Community post
Townhall

I tuned into the Hive townhall meeting this week because it was on at the time i was online so I said I would listen in and see what the lie of the land was. Hive had recently broken the key resistance of $0.04 and went south into unchartered territory. So I was thinking there was gonna be pitchforks and shouting at this townhall but it was surprisingly calm. There was around 15 people on the call which seemed pretty low. It was on a new platform and not Discord which may have been a reason for so little attendance. The witnesses in the loop seem to be pretty nonplussed about the Hive token price. The blockchain is secured from their end, the top 20 witnesses are all pretty much doing their jobs and the bear market is the main reason for Hive's decline. Some of the main guys are not on Discord so they don't hear the noise and it was all very much business as usual for them for Hive.
This was interesting from my end that there was not as much panic there among the top guys on Hive. They know alot more about the Hive mechanics and the HBD debt, inflation and all that so a part of me was happy that the top accounts weren't that concerned.
But a part of me was slightly concerned that if things did go south then there was very little group cohesion to turn this oil tanker around. The host, who was very good by the way,(I forget her name) was trying to address the concerns of the normy's / middleclass of Hive and a couple of issues/ questions were asked by the Community. One question about how do we make sure dev documentation is in one place so that web developers could onboard on Hive easily? The answer to the question from @arcange was a really defining moment for me and I came out of it thinking differently about Hive. It was a run of the mill answer as well. It was that the fact we are decentralised, there is no one centralised location and there are certain documentation in different repos by different witnesses , users etc. If we are to centralise all the documentation then someone could of course do it but it would be up to them. This is exactly true. This is Hive by design, We are not centralised so what the hosts question was asking was for a centralised location to make it easier for users. This made me smile because @arcange was totally correct in what he was saying. The normal Hive user comes from a centralised structure in every day life. Everything in their life is organised in a centralised manner whether it is in work, doing the shopping, at home. The shouts on Discord is for someone to grab the bull by the horns and organise things whether it is onboarding, dev documentation, DHF etc but the fact that Hive is decentralised it is very difficult to regulate or control any of these things that does not involve some element of centralisation. The ship is rudderless by design. What the Hive Community are looking for is the very thing we are trying to get away from.
This is all well and good in the bull market but in a bear market when decisions need to be made , it could be a major issue. The reason for this is that nobody takes control. But we as a community do not want anyone to take control. We also can't agree that the sky is actually blue so the only thing we are left with is the users with the most stake should be the most concerned about the blockchain because they have the most to lose which is some way settling. Steem had a haircut once as well and they got through this so it is not their first rodeo. So unless our highest stakeholders are all multi millionaires and do not care that much for money we should be steered in the right direction, right?? There are maybe 7or 8 major stakeholders that control the voting meaning the voting is more centralised. This may be in fact be Hives saving grace. Centralisation! 😂
When the main guys are not all that concerned about DHF spending I was kind of curious about how much of a chunk the DHF spending takes up in the whole great scheme of things. Does it move the Hive price when HBD is converted to Hive and ends up on exchanges or do the Koreans pretty much control the price of Hive? I do not know this. But this little chart below kind of made me think.

The little red stripe is what all the fuss is about that me , you and all the middle class Hivers are giving out about. No wonder nobody really cares and with us being decentralised and all it means nobody is to blame. There is someone getting handouts , there are people scamming the system but you will get that in a decentralised society. Greed prevails with little or no repercussions other than a "soz guys,the project did not work out or I am active behind the scenes" after banking a couple of hundred grand.
Hell this is why the world went centralised in the first place. Banking regulation came in, rules and laws to stop the world being like the wild west. Exactly what crypto is.
The most important thing is the chain is secure and when the bull market arrives everything we have built will be ready. The problem with witnesses only concerned about the chain being secure. What is the point if nobody is transacting on it? Is this not just wasting peoples time?
At the townhall meeting it was said that work was done to really condense and optimise the storage on Hive so that a Hive node could run on a small device such as a raspberry pi or an old Samsung phone. So if things get real bad, people can still run a node on next to no cost which is a positive thing so the heart will always be beating. But is it a case that the patient is on life support? If we are putting all our hopes on a bull market for the price to increase then are we doomed? With Binance effectively delisting us to only 1 pair which is Hive / USTD , even if a bull market does come then we still could miss out but at least there will be 20 guys securing a chain doing their jobs. From now on , I'm not gonna get too concerned about it if the major stakeholders are voting for a DHF spend. Kudus to the people who have received a few hundred grand from the DHF. It's always the same people close to the money over the last couple of years. No doubt the blockchain is secure so the front door of the house is sturdy and will never be broken but is the backdoor wide open?
Replies (23)
We should just get rid of HBD. Let HIVE just do HIVE things.
How would we pay off the current debt, though?
Just call it a wash. Either way it disappears.
How would that affect the trust in Hive as such?
Why should be witnesses concerned about price? That is not their job, nor it is their job to look into DHF spending. Their only job is to secure the blockchain.
All of the things you list here are the job of stakeholders, not the witnesses.
While some of the top 20 witnesses are massive stakeholders, some of them are not.
And I see this as the problem with people crying witnesses that witnesses this. Price, other than relaying it, is immaterial to a witness. They don't have a mandate to increase the price, their only mandate is to secure the blockchain.
You and I are not majority stakeholders, and we are moving on the whims of those majority stakeholders. That is the reality of a minority stakeholder, in any configuration of stake.
What trust? That's been gone a long long time according to most of the community Discord servers.
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STOPYou believe Hive has no trust, then? So not paying off its debt wouldn't affect it at all? I'm asking for your opinion, not Discord's.
People have lost faith. Trust is gone. We need something to change because what we have been doing isn't working. That's my opinion.
How would defaulting on our debt help, then? Sorry if I sound sharp, I am genuinely intrigued by this idea.
well if Hive price is 1 cent or below are you saying the witnesses should not be concerned at all? Less reward value might be a concern for a witness validating blocks and noone active on chain? Surely there should be some element of responsibility even if their sole job is to secure the chain ?
Is it really debt? It's just tokens were sitting there that someone mined on the old block before everyone had a chance. All it does now is leave the chain.
FYI, you can run a witness node in a raspberry pi, not an API node that will still require a good server. Without the API node, there is no blockchain.
Kindly noted. thanks
Yes, it is not their job to be concerned about price. It is every stakeholders job to be concerned about price. They should not be concerned about price in their capacity as witnesses but as stakeholders.
Refer to previous answer, suppose they are concerned about the witness reward they are receiving, they can shut down their node and be replaced by someone else. But as you can see that is not a concern for witnesses in general. If they don't value it in dollar terms, but just Hive terms. Changes in prices has no bearing in their reward. And blocks will continue to be produced even without no one active on chain. Once again that doesn't concern witnesses in their capacity as witnesses.
What element of responsibility? They are not responsible for price, stakeholders are responsible for price.
All the things you are complaining about are stakeholder problems, not witness problems. Some of the top20 witnesses are big stakeholders, some of them hold 2-3x the power I control which is not that much. But things you list are not their responsibility in their capacity as a witness, but as a stakeholder.
For the things you list, someone that hold a few million HP but not in top20 witness will have the same responsibility with someone that hold that much hp and in top20 witness. Someone that doesn't have as much HP but in top20 witness will not have as much responsibility as someone holding a few million HP but not in top20 witness.
I heard a potato, only the other day 😁
The host was @shadowspub.
It is. Both from the economic and architectural perspective. It functions fundamentally as a protocol-level debt or liability of the network. I thought that was quite clear.
This only proves people actually perceive it as such. What would you do with bonds of a company you do not trust?
I get your point. It's quite comforting to me actually that it will be hard for the blockchain to die. Hence the calmness in the townhall that I was talking about. Is there any witness in the top 20 that is not a major stakeholder? Say under 50k HP? Must give it a check.
I ran one off the cat. 😃
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know all the tokenomics of HIVE. Just enough to get my by for the past 8 or 9 years. I'm angry that my time has become worthless. I used to have a bunch of HBD in savings. I pulled most all of it. While I have confidence in HIVE as a chain, I lost confidence in HBD and the ability of the chain and users to keep its value. When it comes to crypto, people dump everything. It doesn't really matter if they trust it or not. It feels like 90% a bunch of degens just scraping for pennies wherever they can.
I would not consider that as a major stakeholder. That is like 0.025% of stake (currently powered up Hive), it is very little. Anything below 1M, I would not consider as a major stakeholder.
True
It is quite disturbing that the guys still talk about things like proper documentation when the fire is burning. Glad (and good for my blood pressure) I was not there.

Maybe those top guys are millionaires and that´s the reason why they don´t care.
In the meantime even a zombie-like shitcoin overtook Hive.