HPUD | HP | SPINVEST | GROWING THE PLATFORM | DELEGATION | COMMUNITIES - JUNE 2020
I'm two days late and HPUD doesn't seem to be itself (hope @streetstyle is okay, wherever they may be), but here I am on a rainy overcast evening with a Mount Gay rum and coke in hand, catching up with myself.
There's been a couple of interesting posts the last few days: @revisesociology looking at distribution trends on Hive and then @ahb12345 looking at how accounts are voting - are we helping or hindering the growth of Hive? and finally @jongolson about why #myhivegoals is so important.
I like the monthly HPUD post as a way of checking progress and seeing how I'm doing and thinking about next steps. I think within a few more weeks, possibly by the end of my Steem power-down, I'm going to have reached Orca with 100 MV. It would be nice if it was by 17 July 2020 as that will be my third anniversary on the blockchain (it feels like so much longer).
I hardly imagined I would get to this place. When I joined it was as much as I could do to imagine reaching Dolphin with 10 MV at some heady stage in my then future. I've been blessed first with the very low prices which allowed me to increase my stake, and then by the Hive hard fork which doubled my tokens, if not their value.
Since 1 April, by when I had powered up another 1,105 taking my stake to 31,435, I've powered up a further 10,000 Hive or so, taking me to 41,500 HP. There's three more Steem power-downs and a few bits and pieces in alt accounts, which should take me to 50,000+ HP, leaving about 500 or so to find from somewhere by my anniversary.
That feels good to me :)
SPInvest (SPI)
My other big investment is SP Investments (@spinvest), a mutual fund which hodls Hive on behalf of its investors and uses it to earn income, mainly through leasing, which is then used to invest in safe, get-rich-slowly, off-platform investments such as precious metals and bitcoin and some on-platform investments eg Splinterlands cards.
SPInvest recently decided to cap token sales at 100,000 (about 96,000 are already circulating) and, along with a number of other changes to the fund, to start distributing some of the weekly earnings to investors. I've had three weeks worth already (paid at 9pm on Sundays), and so far they represent about 11.5% return (earnings can go down as well as up).
The value of my SPI stake varies from day to day, hour to hour, but has been sitting around $4,000 for the past day or so. It's hard to say how much the orginal stake cost as there were so many variables plus freebies from time to time, but $1000 dollars would be a fair estimate.
I was unsure about the proposal to cap the fund, but I gradually came round to it as, if there were future demand for tokens, a new fund with its own conditions could be set up. Capping this fund (which I'm already thinking of as the Pioneer Fund) provides an opportunity to see how this experiment unfolds in the next stage.
These sorts of mutual funds are going to be hugely important in the future to capitalise other projects and initiatives. And they could be used for ventures like digital shares in high value property and land, meaning that ordinary people could own a bit of Regent Street or Oxford Street or Sand Banks.
Future funds could be set up with higher risk and return and for fixed minimum buy-in terms for specific purposes. At the other end of the scale, there could be baby steps funds designed for encouraging regular saving from an early age with very low risk and a lower, but assured, return.
Growing the Platform
Try as I might to attract new people to Hive, it's a gargantuan task. If they do get here, very few stay. It is still early days, so the sensible thing to do seems to be to ensure that, whoever does get here, is supported and motivated to stay.
For me, there's two ways of doing that: one has been through vote distribution - ensuring that new comers and smaller accounts get a chance to earn; and the other through delegation. I was happy with the analysis of my voting:
Chart and table courtesy of @abh12345, whose post also looks at vote distribution by four of the curation initiatives - curangel, curie, qurator and c-squared. Worth a look and you can request your own pie-chart :)
Delegations
Roughly about half of my stake has been delegated since joining Hive. I've always delegated to small curation trails that support smaller accounts such as @chops-support and @tenkminnows, plus @steemclub-uk for Brit accounts and now, @teamuksupport, which supports the tag #teamuk; @needleworkmonday has always had a small delegation, and so has @steemflagrewards which I think of as a bit like council tax, it helps to keep the streets clean.
There's been a roughly 5,000HP rotating delegation to the Hive Needle Work Monday community to support a membership drive. That will continue for another few weeks, by which time it will have run for about three months, when delegations will drop down to about 1,500HP until the end of August. Two curators @muscara and @marblely do a great job there and, hopefully, by the end of the summer, the community will be settled and posting regularly.
The other big delegation has been to the ReggaeJAHM (previously reggaesteem) community. Reggaesteem had a very promising use case for crypto and had started to build a foundation for that before being devastated by COVID-19 and lockdown measures. This is still a brilliant idea waiting for its time and, for now, we are building the account and supporting a small community until that time comes.
Meanwhile, I've had a diversion: I've recently become admin for The Ink Well community, which has presented a whole range of new and interesting opportunities. As a niche community, it's thriving, and it supports lots of smaller red fish and minnow accounts:
chart and table courtesy of @abh12345
This community is interesting as, like many, it offers potential to become a go-to destination for consumers of stunning poetry and short fiction - people who come to Hive (or whichever front end) to read, rather than create. And, at the same time, like many other communities, it faces the challenge of sustainability: how to create sufficient income to cover the work of running and growing the community. A topic for another time.
Posted Using LeoFinance
