Getting ratioed between LEO and HIVE

With Hive looking a little healthier these days , I always wonder about the opportunity that some people have missed and I am pretty sure that they will feel it. I also get a bit disappointed, as there are people who I believe would have benefited a lot from a rise in price, but just couldn't find it in them to stay consistent. yeah, I know I might take this to an extreme personally as I love writing, but it isn't like the average content here is going to be vying for a Pulitzer, so remaining consistent for many people wouldn't require much effort at all.

It was only a few short weeks ago that a particularly nasty person was laughing about how all the effort I have put in has only amounted to X amount - well, that is Xx2 now - what will it be in a few weeks more? Well, it might be X/2, but I think that we are heading into a bit of a run up on Hive, since there appears to be a little momentum and we are about due.

I realized that while it has taken three years, I have finally got a new ATH, as my total holdings are valued above where they were back at the start of 2018, which was a year after I entered into crypto at all. The high of course was when Steem pushed in price and briefly crossed the 8-dollar mark and at that point, it was the majority of my holding value, and I didn't have much.

It is a bit different now, but HIVE is still a significant part of my holdings and I have worked hard to keep adding to it, often to the detriment of my "wealth" value, as other tokens like Bitcoin have outperformed it by several time. Yet, I am still relatively content, as while my personal value might not be huge, I have been able to use my stake to distribute value to others, something that Bitcoin wouldn't really offer me.

Currently, my vote is about 10 HIVE worth, which means that I am distributing 100 HIVE a day. The curation return is 50 or so on that and I don't spend any time maximizing my vote. What this means though is that every week, I distribute about 350 HIVE into the community, every 10 weeks it is 3500, every year it is about 17000. That might not seem like much to some, but I think it is a fairly decent amount in my terms, who knows how much time, effort and work it took me to earn 17,000 HIVE myself.

I have probably distributed a quarter of that amount on comments that I receive, maybe more. The rest gets pushed out to posts and people that I enjoy, with more value pushed to those I think add consistent value to the community as well, who are often people I end up being friends with. It sounds like cronyism perhaps, but it is not, it is like minds, similar behaviors - Birds of a feather kinds of things.

I have spent a lot of time observing on Hive and it is true that people of similar behavior tend to form cliques of a kind. For example, those who consistently power up tend to group, while those who consistently power down cluster also. People tend to group more along these lines than they do on content topics it seems, which makes sense from a behavioral perspective, as in general, people interested in investing tend to stick together anyway and those on Hive who are powering up, are often the people who are not only interested in the financial investment, but also the social investment, the Hive community. They say, invest into what you know.

With a future where I believe there will be a focus on bringing the human back into the equations, I believe that investing into the community makes sense, but it isn't a charity - it can't be a charity. Things need to get done, content needs to be created, value has to be added and while there can be a lot of argument around what is truly value adding, one thing is certain, participation is required - activity is necessary.

What has been interesting over the last few days is that while price increases, people seem to comment less, except for those who are targeting a maximization of comment votes, which seems to happen a bit round LEO posts at the moment, as there are quite a few LEO holders who are currently distributing decent amounts of value. This is fantastic, as it shows how valuable stake is in incentivizing behavior.

What is going to be interesting however is what is going to happen when HIVE is pushing 50 cents or a dollar also - will the HIVE whales come back into favor - perhaps even the orcas like myself?

Currently, a 1 LEO vote will deliver about 3 HIVE in value - but that is likely going to go down as HIVE increases in value, unless it can increase at a faster rate, which I hope happens as I have LEO stake too. What this means is that What this means is that if LEO and HIVE are both at a dollar, the ratio between will be 1:1, meaning that whatever stake is required on LEO to deliver one LEO token, will have a counter part on HIVE too. I don't know what this means in the terms of total supply ETC, but I do know that I already have my HIVE stake past 200K and can deliver 100 HIVE a day - but my LEO stake is just over 11,000 and is currently punching above its weight in respect to HIVE. For an account to deliver the same 100 HIVE equivalent, they only need about 65,000 LEO. But, if the ratio falls back to 1:1 or less, that LEO stake isn't so attractive to people targeting stake which means if there are people relying on their stake to attract attention, that attention might wither away as people start to look elsewhere.

This is brilliant, as it forces people to make decisions on where they are going to spend their time, with the people only here to maximize their earnings spending time where they can earn the most. Hopefully, over time, these people start to find it increasingly hard to earn, especially if they haven't been building their own stake to become distributive forces in the community. I think that for those who have earned well here but do not think that they have to be part of the distribution mechanisms, should have their potential to earn reduced be social behaviors, unless they really add value to the community through some other mechanisms.

This might sound harsh, but it is part of the investment game, isn't it? People invest to increase their value, but if an investment vehicle is costing more than it adds, it is cut away. In this case, each of us are investment vehicles and while we can add value in many ways, one of those values is being a sink for HIVE (or LEO or other tokens) as well as a distributive force that looks to use those earnings to distribute to more value adding nodes in the network. This of course doesn't mean people shouldn't profit from their work, but there has to be some balance between profiteering and investing, where value is rolled back into help others in the community build.

Regardless of all this (which I do not think I explained clearly), what is happening is that the community and economy is becoming increasingly dynamic and complex, building and breaking focal points and making it difficult for anyone to maximize on everything. This creates opportunities for more people to get a toe hold in and start to build their own niche in the community, increasingly branching the community out, distributing it further afield, decentralizing away from the core. But, it takes participation in some way to take advantage and unless one is able to buy in directly at an adequate personal level, that will probably mean interacting within the community in order to earn.

As you probably realize, I find the Hive community fascinating in many ways and as it expands and complexity increases across the social, technological and economic domains, it gets increasingly attractive, as it becomes more unpredictable in where it will go next. While it seems small now, I would suspect that most people on Hive at present, don't know half of what is going on around the community and most likely, that visibility will keep decreasing as the value of the community as a whole increases.

Already now, I feel that I am missing large amounts of what is happening on Hive, whereas it wasn't that long ago that I felt I had a pretty good overall picture if it all. It is maturing rapidly. Pretty awesome.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]