What Might Hive Be Worth? More Questions Than Answers.

Yeah, I’m going to ramble. I sure as hell don’t have rock-solid answers. Maybe even the questions aren’t on firm ground.

What might Hive be valued at a year from now? Five years from now?

“To the moon!” seems to be a standard response, but I’m wondering if folks here have some more specific estimates based on fundamentals, System X technical analysis, or the study of goat entrails.

Note that I’m being a bit sloppy in that price and value are not really interchangeable terms. While we can go to coingecko.com to find the current price of Hive, there’s no easy way to determine its present value, let alone what its value might be at some point in the future.

Hive’s price has been bouncing along in a fairly narrow range for a while now on rather anemic volume (but better than Steem’s, hah). But as someone who’s here for the long haul, I couldn’t care less if Hive’s price goes up or down by 10% over the next 24 hours.

And it certainly can be argued that, even after the long crypto winter, Hive is currently grossly overpriced. One (perhaps clumsy) way of looking at it is to get some idea of market capitalization versus activity. Granted, a crude metric without obvious cause/effect relationships. Right now Hive has a market cap of roughly $90 million. A rounding error, even in the crypto space which is currently about $270 billion, itself a rounding error compared to markets like equities, bonds, real estate, forex, or derivatives.

Nominally, there are well over a million Hive accounts, but the vast majority of them are inactive. @arcange and @penguinpablo both post statistics about usage on the Hive blockchain. Do take a look-see at their posts on a semi-regular basis to get a feel for the level of activity here. Both of them are showing that out of those roughly 1.4 million accounts that could be active, only about 12,000 of them actually are active.

That $90 million market cap works out to USD $7,500 per active account. How to account for that rationally?

I’ll admit that users per dollar amount of “value” might not be a great metric. FarceBook and Twutter aren’t valued anywhere near that per user.

But one of our ongoing issues is a case of tunnel vision. Many of us still mentally pigeonhole Hive as social media. Initially, the Steem blockchain had one use case, Steemit, a Reddit rip-off with a cryptocurrency add-on.

And in some ways, Hive still has social media DNA. Even now, you can blog about your cat and get paid for it.

But, down the road, blogging will likely be no more than a niche. What happens when use of the Hive blockchain explodes? @edicted has recently done several posts discussing what will likely happen once the Hive blockchain starts getting way more activity and Resource Credits become hot property. Go read them.

Blogging is by now old school. The Web 3.0 use-cases of the Hive blockchain are still in their infancy. The killer dApps and use-cases haven’t even been imagined, much less built.

My gut feeling is that Smart Media Tokens have massive potential, but I’d be the first to admit that I’m more nerd than geek. It’s clear to me that SMT’s could have at least an indirect effect on the demand for, and therefore the price of, Hive tokens. It’s less clear to me if there might be a direct effect on the demand for the Hive token. But maybe I’m missing something painfully obvious. Please enlighten me.

Every single one of us now in the Hive ecosystem is an Early Adopter. The vast majority of the public is clueless about crypto. Maybe they've heard of Bitcoin, but they probably don’t own any. They couldn’t name even one other cryptocurrency. But something big is percolating. Jamie Dimon going all-in on FUD doesn’t happen for no reason. Mario Draghi did not have to talk about Bitcoin. Imagine if Jerome Powell had talked like that! Cracks are forming on the surface, indicative of huge forces in play.

The cryptocurrency space is still minuscule. What if the crypto revolution turns out to be even bigger than the internet revolution?

Feel free to discuss possible prices, values, gaping flaws in my thinking, and use cases in the comments below.

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