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Shooting Myself In The Knee Has Never Felt So Right PT2 - Layer 0 - The Community

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@mistakili
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Hello guys, this article is a continuation of the post I titled "Shooting Myself In The Knee Has Never Felt So Right".

In the link to the post highlighted above, I wrote about the 3 most important layers in every blockchain technology, in this post, I want to delve deeper into Layer 0 i.e The Community.

A community is a group of people who share the same ideals, goals and vision, or simply common interest. An ideal community should be as populated and diverse as possible and be able to accommodate a wide range of class of people with different skills so that the economy can have a balance, this is not in terms of monetary weight or distribution, its about what role or skill each individual is playing or brings to or within the community.

Attributes of Layer 0

This is no different when it comes to decentralized ecosystems/communities powered by Blockchain Technology. An ideal "community" should be populated by two categories of users:

Please note that when I refer to "users", it encapsulates both categories as seen below;

  • User A
  • User B

The categorization goes further as each perform different roles but in the aim to achieve a common goal.

User A

  • Developers
  • Investors

User B

  • Content Creators
  • Analysts
  • Speculators
  • And sadly.........Naysayers

I left out Marketers because in a Decentralized ecosystem, every stakeholder is a representative and either directly or indirectly a marketer of that project.

Our Case Of Study In This Post Will Be Hive Blockchain. Now here goes the question.

Which of these category of users is the most important in fostering a "Blockchains" mass adoption?


If we take a look at the evolution of Bitcoin, it wouldn't have existed without a developer(s) writing the codes, as we are all familiar with the Bitcoin slogan "Based on math and code", so to a large extent, we can all attest to the fact that no DEV ops, no Bitcoin, then, if we remember very well, users came along before investors, the Bitcoin pizza day is remembered till today because of its significance as it relates to how Bitcoin was once used.

On May 22, 2010, when bitcoin was a little over a year old, he bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. The day is now known as “Bitcoin Pizza Day.” Source

If we look intrinsically at the scenario above, we can also see that every "user" in this context play a major role in making Bitcoin what it is today. Breaking down these users by percentage of roles and responsibilities, we have;

Developers - In my opinion, developers take 40% responsibility, unarguably, developers are responsible for the innovations that people are able to use. Also, the infrastructure must be robust enough to accommodate sporadic developments.

Investors - Every project needs funding, most go through the way of ICO but it isn't compulsory, Steem had no ICO's. The availability of funds gives access to some services that help foster the growth and development of the project. I give them 20% responsibility because a well funded project can be mis managed and a myriad of things could go wrong.

Content Creators - One of the easiest things to do is search for bitcoin on the internet, and see tons and tons of almost endless articles, images, charts, stories, websites about Bitcoin, content creators have played a huge role in making this possible.

The internet today is a global village and a data house of information where anyone anywhere with a mobile phone and internet can have access to myriad of information with regards to Bitcoin. We can say content creators get the project out there so they get 40%.

Chart

This statistic is also evident on the Hive blockchain, for example, the presence of developers led to the creation of first, the chain, then the best blockchain game in the world, Splinterlands, here, most content creators got converted into gamers, while still also creating content - now for the game, getting it out there and fostering its growth.

Another example is the SteemLeo project which is now LeoFinance, it is evident that it is a community with talented developers who keep creating and offering its community tools to foster its growth and now even running a witness. Justin Sun and Steems saga led to a lot of disaster within the blockchain, a lot of projects on Steem-Engine were torn apart, one of them was SteemLeo but its now rebranded to LeoFinance and is nicely picking up while some are dead and gone.

Just the other day, a dev within the community released the Hive referral onboarding tool which has been super useful in onboarding new users., quite visibly, there've been a lot development going on within the community.

Over the course of the week, we got a news about the reduction of developer activity on one of the most prominent blockchains existing , EOS, more on that can be found here.

Over the past year, the activity of developers of several blockchain projects at once has significantly decreased. EOS (85%), Bitcoin Cash (63%) and Tron (51%) turned out to be anti-leaders in the number of developers who left projects, according to a study by Outlier Ventures.

Source

This contributes to my hypothesis about the importance of Developers in a community as stated above, whereas its been development upon developments within Hive, what then makes developments on Hive continuous and attractive? Fast, Feeless, Decentralized? Community? Maybe devs could answer that question.

Just today Coindesk shared a news on twitter that Reddit was having scaling issues with its new points system based on Ethereum, this also confirms what I wrote in this post , Scalability is the least of the issues to come, I don't want to be a naysayer but its just that a centralized management applying a decentralized tech doesn't necessarilly mean the tech ecosystem automatically becomes "decentralized" as Reddit claims(No shades intended) ,not to even talk of the fact that the underlying infrastructure being the present version of Ethereum.

I just see it as a means for a couple of Ethereum Devs to cash out from Ethereum Foundation, no biggie.

Hive List

There's a project about to decentralize the popular Craigslist being built on Hive-Engine, it has immense potential to put Hive as a currency to a more practical use than ever before, craigslist is the 55th most visited website in the world according to Alexa rankings, now imagine a craigslist but on a blockchain, that rewards its users, oh people think the internet is astonishing, wait till they find out about Web 3.0 from the Hive perspective. Read more about it here

Without any arguments, it is evident that Hive is more dev friendly because of its programming language, Java, its fast and feeless transactions and ability to scale at large, even more, Hive also has the DHF, decentralized Hive fund that is capable of funding projects that have the potential to attract value to both the chain and the dev.

I don't know how long more Hive will remain a sleeping giant, but I can predict that in 10years Hive is going to surpass the accomplishments of Bitcoin, now you may say I'm high on Hive again, but just imagine 100 businesses like Splinterlands being built on Hive! Oh speaking of that, Splinterlands is going to be attending a boot camp isshh for game startups and it is organized by Ubisoft, if you're a gamer you'd understand that its a big deal. Will Splinterlands lead Ubisoft to Hive? Only time will tell.

Last time I wrote this post I was supposed to take the shot, but I forgot to load in bullets, now I'm fully loaded, nothing can stop me now.

Thank you for reading!