Thank you for passing by

Six years of Hive. A decade of the platform.

"Can you promise that I will come back?"
"No. And if you do, you will not be the same."
_{- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey}

I'm a Hive witness, and one of the core developers of the platform. I've spent nearly a decade making sure the chain keeps producing a block every three seconds - through every update, every crisis. You don't see most of it. The patches at 02:00, the nodes moved because a datacenter had "unexpected maintenance" (on a holiday, naturally), the coordinated updates where twenty people have to do the right thing at the right time and hope nobody's cat walks across their keyboard. The boring stuff and the exciting stuff. Keeping the lights on, moving things forward, and making sure the platform stays secure and reliable.

Over the past decade, I've crossed paths with amazing people from this community while visiting different countries.
Mexico. Peru. Portugal. Netherlands. Luxembourg. Germany. Austria. Croatia. Thailand. Singapore. Malaysia. Indonesia. Japan.
Some came to Poland for HiveBeeCon - twice now - because when HiveFest moves to the other side of the planet, you do what any reasonable(?) wizard would do and host your own gathering ;-)
Others visited me for a walk or talk, or building a snowman.

I won't try to list everyone.
I'd need a whole separate post and I'd still miss someone.
You know who you are.
And maybe I even miss you.

A decade is long enough for a platform to become a crossroads.

People arrived, stayed for a while, left their mark.
Some built things. Some broke things.
Not everyone who passed through left the place better than they found it.
But enough of them did.
Some moved on to other projects, other passions, other chapters.
Some are out there in corners of the world I can barely imagine.
Some have passed away.

All of them left their marks in this immutable chain of blocks.

I still haven't powered down. Not once in a decade. And I'm glad to be in the company of friends, family, and fools who continue this exciting journey into our niche social, governance, economic, and technological experiment ;-)

I don't know what the next decade holds. I know the blocks keep coming every three seconds. I know there are people building things right now that I'll be writing about next year.
But probably I won't because I'm bad at writing.

A decade. We made it this far. Good job everyone.
Happy Hive Birth Day!

We are Hive.
Thank you for passing by.
(Well, most of you. ;-) )