Head, tail or split down the middle kinda whale?

Since it is The mid-year Hive Power Up Day, I thought I'd get crazy and dump all my liquids into my HP, which happened to be just enough to get my account half way to the whaledom, a mythical place in the Hive ecosystem that requires 500,000 HIVE POWER for the label. With half that, I am sitting in 66th position on the account HIVE POWER list. In order to cross the line, I had to eat a dolphin.

This might be my last major powerup for a while, as I would like to have some liquids free for when there is finally a major pump on HIVE - but I have said that before and here we are AGAIN.

There is an addiction to Hive gamification and as I have said many times in the last four and a half years, it is the best game on the internet. Not only is there the Hive and Hive-related aspects of it, but Hive is a hub for many things crypto related, as it is a point of information sharing where there are many interested parties gathered together, speculating both financially and predictively on all kinds of market conditions. Then there are all the applications, interfaces, initiatives and of course, HIVE mining opportunities to use and take advantage of, in a diverse community of players, all participating as they choose.

When it comes to market sentiment, if the rest of crypto users were as connected to the industry as Hiveans are, the industry would explode and be unstoppable. I think that a lot of what holds crypto back from mainstreaming, is that other than the perceived potential for financial gains, most users don't actually use the industry itself. They might sit in Telegram and Reddit groups and like some Tweets on CryptoTwitter, but only a low percentage are actually adding much activity onto the blockchains themselves and most of what people are adding, are token transfers transactions. This limits crypto to the currency side of things, rather than the industry of business enablement possible.

How I see it in the future though, is that "monetary" transactions are going to be a side effect of business activity, not the business itself as most of the industry is now. I think that the Custom JSONs of Splinterlands activity is a good example of business activity on Hive and this type of transaction mass will grow exponentially across all blockchains that offer real utility. People talk about the utility of a token, but a lot of it is promiseware utility with even the people backing the future, not actually using the blockchain itself.

Hive probably has one of the highest utilization rates in crypto for non financial transactions by the user base, but of course, all of it is still tied to some kind of financial expectation, which is how an economy should work. One of the reasons that people believe mainstream Bitcoin adoption requires vendors accepting it as a currency, is because it doesn't have much use otherwise. However, HIVE doesn't actually need to be accepted externally for it to be used, because there is a strong reason for usage on the Hive blockchain itself, even if there is that expectation of being able to benefit from the value of it off-chain too.

This sets up part of the gamification model of course, as it puts tension between buying and selling, as well as powering up and staying liquid, as there are benefits to both, but one can't have the cake and eat it too. Powering up gives access to the rewards pool and the ability to allocate it, but it takes away the ability to sell the tokens on the market. Selling will get an immediate return of some kind, but buying allows for staking and that access.

These basic tensions set up social gamification mechanisms too, where having HIVE powered up leads to some kind of influence on the platform, without having to be influential as a person. This can be important for those who for example want to be part of building the Hive platform future, but aren't the kinds of people who want or are able to develop or write about these kinds of things - so instead support those who do and can with their stake.

There are so many sides to Hiving that are enjoyable in numerous ways, which is why even though I would like to have liquids available, I also don't mind powering up my HIVE to do more with it than just transact it as a token. Reaching the point of "half a whale" means having 25x more HIVE than I ever thought I would hold and while I don't think I will ever make it all the way to the 500K, I am looking forward to the value this stake can generate, on and off the chain, in all the ways it can be used.

I don't know if I am the head half, the tail half or a half of a whale split down the middle, but I am glad that in my time here, I have been able to support a lot of people on their own Hive journeys over the years, as community development is one of the usecase reasons for powering up I value. It might amount to naught, or it might be a key to changing the world. I want to be part of finding out.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]