Thoughts About Hive Never Leave Vitalik Buterin's Mind
Founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin always had positive views about Hive and shared his thoughts about Hive from the very beginning of it. We have seen in the past how he used example of Hive blockchain and its community in his articles. Recently we have even seen him continue bringing Hive up in podcasts as well.
Today, he did it again. He published an article titled The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy. Feel free to read the full article. It is an interesting read.
Once again Vitalik uses Hive and its community to explain and make his case for legitimacy as the most important scarce resource.
After talking a little bit about Bitcoin and Ethereum, he starts a section with a sub-title - Coins can be owned by social contracts, he starts to talking about Hive:
To better understand the force that we are getting at, another important example is the epic saga of Steem and Hive. In early 2020, Justin Sun bought Steem-the-company, which is not the same thing as Steem-the-blockchain but did hold about 20% of the STEEM token supply. The community, naturally, did not trust Justin Sun. So they made an on-chain vote to formalize what they considered to be a longstanding "gentleman's agreement" that Steem-the-company's coins were held in trust for the common good of Steem-the-blockchain and should not be used to vote. With the help of coins held by exchanges, Justin Sun made a counterattack, and won control of enough delegates to unilaterally control the chain. The community saw no further in-protocol options. So instead they made a fork of Steem-the-blockchain, called Hive, and copied over all of the STEEM token balances - except those, including Justin Sun's, which participated in the attack.
Then he presents a screenshot of Hive Ecosystem taken from hive.io. It seems obvious he has been keeping eye on progress on Hive. Here is the screenshot he used:
And they got plenty of applications on board. If they had not managed this, far more users would have either stayed on Steem or moved to some different project entirely.
Impressive! He continues his thoughts with presenting lessons we can learn:
The lesson that we can learn from this situation is this: Steem-the-company never actually "owned" the coins. If they did, they would have had the practical ability to use, enjoy and abuse the coins in whatever way they wanted. But in reality, when the company tried to enjoy and abuse the coins in a way that the community did not like, they were successfully stopped. What's going on here is a pattern of a similar type to what we saw with the not-yet-issued Bitcoin and Ethereum coin rewards: the coins were ultimately owned not by a cryptographic key, but by some kind of social contract.
It is clear to me Hive, as recognized by one of the brilliant minds in blockchain space, will continue to be used in academic studies in explaining and understanding blockchain, decentralization, and role communities play in them.
It was really nice to see Vitalik trying to stay up-to-date with the progress on Hive, using it for his academic research and explaining his thoughts.
I asked him again on Twitter when he would join Hive.
He is probably happy with having his own personal website for his article. But it doesn't hurt to ask. So, I will keep asking whenever there is an opportunity.
Here is the link to his Tweet.
https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1374467382706499588?s=20
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