Pick up sticks and blocks

When I was a kid, we didn't have a set of pick-up-sticks, but we did have a lot of colored pencils, so we played the ghetto version of it. My daughter and I play lots of games where we don't have the right equipment for, but we make do. It really is, part of the fun. Like cutting fish out of colored paper, attaching a paperclip and using a fridge magnet on a string attached to a coat hanger as the fishing rod. She loves it.

She has toys of course (far too many in my opinion), but it is the ones that we make together that get the most usage, which I put down to her being part of the creative process. When we make something for ourselves, the value of it goes up in our eyes, as we have put our own blood, sweat and tears into having it - plus, we are more likely to feel the sense of ownership, since before we made it, it didn't exist at all - meaning it truly is ours.

I think this is an important learning point to focus on for her, where we are able to entertain ourselves with what we have available, without having to have specialized equipment or, something made for us. All we need is some skill, and a decent imagination.

The future is creatively distributed

These are two things I feel are beginning to be noticeably lacking in the world today, as while people seem to feel there is more content they can choose from, it is only because the pool it comes from is far larger and can be cherrypicked globally. At the local level though, I feel people are just more relays of what they consume, which is generally mainstream content and therefore, "creativity" is becoming homogeneity.

We played tower for the first time today, which is probably a game everyone knows, but the first time I played it was in Finland as an adult, over drinks at a bar many years ago. Smallsteps was far better at it than I thought she would be, as sometimes she gets a little overzealous and doesn't pay attention to what all the bits of her body are doing. However, it was me who had the most issues, as I have lost some of my hand-eye coordination since the stroke and my hands aren't that steady.

Yet, it is exactly these kinds of skills and simple problem-solving activities that I need to work on, to repair the foundation that has crumbled away. They are also skills that will build the foundation for my daughter that she can flesh-out further as she grows too. So much of our lives these days are engineered and while they seem diverse, a lot of the skills are keeping us mentally narrow, much like going to the gym and only working certain body parts on machines. Without a full range of motion, all of the little connector muscles and tendons do not strengthen and coordinate to work together, so while the muscles might get stronger, all of the connectors become points of weakness.

Utilizing a credible example

Lately, I have been returning my thoughts to the Hive ecosystem more and how valuable the interconnectedness is, even though I am exploring it from different angles. For example, I have been investing into Splinterlands assets for about four months now and am doing relatively well, but I wonder what would have happened if originally, they would have started somewhere else, within another communities. They have been around for a few years now (almost four?) and have obviously done very well - but if the game had been on the Ethereum blockchain, it likely would look a lot like Cryptokitties now - dead.

But, it isn't just the chain that matters, it is mostly the community. For example, @yabapmatt and @aggroed are long time community members and witnesses, with the latter being a mid-2016 account and T20 witness for much of the time since. This gave them something that is very important for investors - credibility, and they had a long-term affiliation with the community itself prior to the game launch, which gave them influence. When Splinterlands finally launched, they weren't starting from scratch from a reputational standpoint, nor from a financial perspective either, since they were already earning in various ways on chain. I am not saying this covered all the development, but it gives them a lower barrier of entry for their product launch, and this is something that is highly valuable for any application to not just build the hype in the market, but keep people engaged through the startup and development phases over time.

Jump that rope and run

However, not all applications are going to be coming from already connected users, which means that they are going to have to build their credibility and reputation in other ways. Word of mouth can be very powerful and what is going to be increasingly valuable on Hive will be the ability for the technical infrastructure to work as a launchpad and the social network to spread the word to those who can support startup, investors and users. And on Hive, there is already a highly valuable pool of investors willing to take stake ownership for the future. - and the more this happens, the more it can happen, and the more individual wealth value spreads to attract more developers.

It is a very interesting ecosystem to be a part of, but the real value is the economy itself, as it ties all parts of the community together in some way and while not only creating stability, it also allows for a growing amount of resources available to build with. The fact is that most communities and applications on Hive at the moment will not survive, as they are generally trying to "live off Hive" itself, rather than generate value for themselves. Splinterlands ahs managed over the years to firstly do this, and then shift their value increasingly to be stand alone on the second-layer of the blockchain, which is something that very few projects in the world have successfully managed.

But, they have also pushed more interaction with the chain, by leveraging other components of the infrastructure, like the social elements, to empower their game, outside of the game. This means that the players not only have a blockchained play-to-earn game, they also have an expanding and increasingly valuable in its own right, community to interact with. This makes the game for more attractive because there are many faces of Splinterlands which are often hosted on and empowered by Hive infrastructure and the community too.

But, the majority of the players are not only Splinterlands players, they are also well-practiced in the arts of Hive, which means they have their eyes, ears and wallets open to take part in other projects too. This interlaces the value flows across the applications and earning mechanisms, and connects them all at the Hive blockchain level, increasing the stability and potential to lower the barriers of entry for more applications that can support a growing userbase on Hive and connected to Hive by second-layer gateways.

Infra-connectedness

Lately, I have talked about Splinterlands a lot, but it isn't just because I am invested and interested in it at the moment. It is a very good illustration of the value of building a second-layer community economy on common architecture, as it gives the potential for synergies (I hate that word) to form in all kinds of ways, creating a very complex mesh of transactions and social interactions to not only share risk, but create that foundation of skill, creativity and investment resources to take risks.

This is the power of the Hive ecosystem and the community itself, as there is a very high potential for people to be able to develop with low risk, and get highly valuable support. As long as they are able to continually develop something that is firstly usable and then valuable, they will continue to have more support underpin their next steps. The trick is though, don't rush - build.

The problem with not rushing though is that in order to build something with lasting value, it is going to have to survive through more than the bullruns, it is going to have to live through the much longer bear markets too. Because of various reasons like transaction fees, many projects aren't going to be able to hold attention of their user base. The reason that Splinterlands was able to, was because it offered usecase in a form that people enjoyed, despite the bear markets and this meant that those users also knew that come the bull, they are going to be in for some good times - as we can see now.

You want abundance?

But, a lot of "projects" don't last the bears because they aren't projects at all, they are points of token speculation, most with no community to speak of, no mesh-network of transaction and social interaction, no usecase, no users - because there is nothing to really use, which means holding value there is just a cost in a bear market, with no upside potential. While many will disagree, as there are costs to holding HIVE in a bear, many people did hold all the way through bear markets, people did build applications and communities, people did earn and, people did buy more, so they could be part of the Hive infrastructure value layer and, be well-positioned to take advantage of all the second-layer to come.

With so much growth potential, opportunity to build and the possibility to generate massive amounts of multi-layered wealth, if someone is looking for a future of abundance where a highly distributed community can collaborate at granular levels on a near endless range of projects, Hive is pretty much the only place to be at the moment. Don't get stuck looking narrow, the bigger picture is already enormous and, we are nowhere near the border limits yet.

In Pick-up-sticks, the goal is to take a stick without disrupting any others, until there are none left. On Hive, all the sticks are tied together, move one, and everything moves with it. And the pile of opportunity is getting larger, not smaller.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]