Now that we're in the new year its time to make some plans and look ahead. Its challenging to come up with a strategic vision from a personal perspective when dealing with minute day to day type details on an ongoing basis which are all important. To look ahead I have to take a pause and forget.

So to get to drafting a plan for the year best to just go through the routine for starters.

Typical day:

This is a mix of witness (governance) and general Hive type tasks.

• check Twitter and other 'hiveblocks' medias, post as relevant, reply to legitimate messages
• check on the Hive discord and telegram channels
• check emails, reply as needed
• check in with active partnership discussions and keep those going (there's about ten of these at any given moment but they don't all move at the same pace)
• touch base with various promotional projects (usually DHF type or Value Plan projects) and assist them as needed
• work on documents, either publications or other types (write or provide feedback)
• make sure non-protocol infrastructure that is my responsibility is functional and fix/update when needed
• make sure primary node and backup nodes are properly functional
• check on project servers and sites, fix where needed

This is all just regular type of activities and don't change. Depending on what's going on they take different amounts of time but can usually be done in about 2-4 hours, split during the day. Reason its split is because some actions need to be run through more than once. Node and infrastructure checks take a few minutes. Partnerships and promotional projects take the longest and depending on what's going on can eat up a whole day. I'm not counting average of working on the witness or API (which hopefully will be back up soon) in here except for the basic checks as those don't fall into daily events and they don't take long. Also discounting irregular Hive deliverables that depend on what's going on. Further optimizing the workflow for these minor tasks needs to take place this year to limit the time spent and free it up for these larger Hive deliverables. In general, now that Hive is long-established I allocate about 30-40 hours to Hive over a 7-day week.

The biggest hangup is Discord communication which is conducive for socializing but not for work. I miss key messages at times which is not acceptable as I have the responsibility to reply with some semblance of urgency. I'm terminating the app on all systems except for PC in hopes that active conversations can stop being marked read, which is sub-optimal to then go through and manually verify as having actually been read. For this reason all partnership type discussions I prefer to keep on Telegram so nothing is missed.

The other hangup is illness over the last month or so which no amount of preventative measures seem to keep away.

Strategic vision

My only goal here is the success of Hive. As we age, social impact supersedes personal success. What helped Hive in the past was generally going the complete opposite direction from all these startups and corporate types, which is unexpected. The reason is they're meant for a quick turnaround and Hive is meant for a longstanding existence beyond the typical roadmap of a few quarters. In the coming year I'm going to put my all in seeking out new opportunities and getting Hive out there.

1. Improve decentralization

In November last year a large portion of Solana's validators were shut down by Hetzner. There's a good short overview that was subsequently published by Blockdaemon, one of the validators, with lessons learned.

While much like Solana, Hive can survive this type of datacenter shutdown (the same type of shutdown is not possible with Hive but let's just leave that and use the example) due to its present decentralization, being prepared is vital. An important point I want to deliver on this coming year is decentralizing my servers throughout the planet geographically. We want to get where any regional issues or power outages can't affect the full scope of the Hive infrastructure. Think a server in Europe, a server in South America, a server in Africa. I can't say what countries or what datacenters but I started looking around. Not all are suitable for Hive.

This isn't the first round of infrastructure decentralization by a long shot but I didn't get the results I wanted in previous attempts to balance the servers between North American and European locations. I will still keep them around but I don't think that's good enough as power outage recovery here when it comes to private servers (servers stored in private locations, such as in corporate buildings) is garbage. Part of the problem is whenever there's a power outage or other similar type of an issue that affects service delivery, restoration is slow.

You may have heard about the Rogers Outage in Canada last year which took down almost every notable network including police services. I don't have all my personal services on one provider and was able to get through it without too much of a hassle except for extensive hotspot use. But it's a good lesson not to keep everything dependent on that one service. The only solution is decentralization of assets and like Blockdaemon pointed out, a good plan.

2. Support others

Hive won't succeed with the old crab bucket mentality. You don't need to push down others on Hive in order to succeed and there is no real need to keep Hive-based dapps and products in competition. There are about 2.5 mil accounts on Hive right now.

Can a newly discovered opportunity help another dapp? Can some promotional project be used to showcase a whole range of Hive dapps? When Hive dapps and projects succeed everyone succeeds. That doesn't mean we got to blindly trust new projects that come off flashy and promise the moon but what that means is we need to work together, communicate with one another, share opportunities.

The crab bucket analogy is rudimentary in a way and speaks to an artificial ecosystem which is amplified by centralization. The basis of the theory is mutual failure through competition. Let's keep going with it for argument sake but then let's twist it some. The crabs in the bucket are trying to get out over the top of other crabs because they are in the bucket. The crabs are driven by the desire to succeed on the backs of their fellow crabs in direct competition with them because no other way exists. Here's a good write-up on this. Those who exhibit this mentality are powered by jealousy and shellfishness selfishness.

Crabs belong in the ocean. It's that simple. So why are we talking about these crabs in the bucket and treating this ecosystem as a bucket when the ecosystem has long evolved from its original pre-Hive vision that had no scalability or longevity as goals? There is no competition among Hive community members. One member won't succeed by shutting down others. The Hive ecosystem may be a sea right now but it has the opportunity to evolve into an entire ocean. And that's because Hive is meant to scale and abolished the hierarchical structure (of seeking approval from a specific account) that kept the userbase contained in a bucket. By abolishing centralization it destroyed the bucket.

Sure some people still think that the DPoS system in itself is a hierarchy and that's because of stake-based voting which directly affects monetization of all forms. Governance indeed is tiered. But this monetization is only the Hive-protocol-based reward pool and distribution style monetization. Anyone can build whatever they want on Hive. The project build doesn't need to have anything to do with curation or the DHF. The project can simply use the blockchain as it's meant to be used; as a protocol with additional value-added layers and modular plugins to build on. If we look at Hive objectively without any interference from any personal biases then we can clearly see that this is the best blockchain to build on because there is no centralized control. And the more that's built on Hive, the larger the ocean.

3. Expand and organize

Hive has a high learning curve because there are numerous ways to get anything done. Take lite accounts which keep coming up these days; there are many ways to achieve them but in the end its a fine balance between a lesser level of responsibility and finality. Anything on the blockchain has an element of finality attached to it; once a transaction is broadcast its on the chain. I am aiming to end up putting together something along the lines of a research paper on Hive onboarding or a sub-component such as these lite accounts. It's a project I already started and am getting my thoughts together on. I'll save discussion for another post.

Personal improvement

I will write more and try and get out at least one post a week as a goal. I'd say that it would be a personal post and not a Hive post but I'd be lying. I don't know if that's possible because I don't have too much to say on topics of any interest to anyone, but I will make an honest effort. As far as new year's resolutions go, I will try and end my hatred of Ruby.