There's a few things I like about Hive that I don't often write about. I wrote a tweet recently calling out some of the differences between Hive and the other giants which you can't really mention enough times, so think I will start there and then go back to the title of the post. It's something important for people to remember and know about if they're new.
Satoshi created Bitcoin, he shared it with a few people in an email list, some thought "what the heck" and started mining Bitcoin on their CPU's. It continued being discussed from there on out and over time more and more people joined in to mine and secure the network, but in the beginning there were very few. Some of those people were getting a lot of BTC as the block reward was 50 BTC per 10 minutes and only very few CPU's in the network doing the work. It's estimated that Satoshi left over 1 million BTC untouched from those early mining days. Why he chose that distribution I'm not sure, but I can imagine that having created something yourself you'd want to earn as much of it as you can. Similar feelings I'm sure ned and dan had when they launched Steem, compared to Satoshi, though, their early distribution was even more rampant and they tried their best to not let anyone know or fairly participate.
Ethereum was launched similarly but was also sold in an effort to fund its early development. Compared to BTC's mining that had evolved over time from CPU's to GPU's and later to specific machines to more efficiently do what is required to mine it, Ethereum only allowed you to mine it with your GPU. People could mine it from wherever in the world and many did, but compared to BTC there was already a big supply of Ether in circulation belonging to the investors who I believe bought them for 33 cents each. Now many years later Ethereum finally made the switch from mining to staking.
Okay so why am I talking about this. Think about how these tokens were distributed. Ever since BTC became inefficient to mine with CPU + GPU it already started becoming unfair in a way to the general public. They couldn't just mine it using their normal computer parts anymore, but even then they had a disadvantage to server farms and people with access or renting power to them. Now it wasn't just 1 person, 1 computer and 1 electricity costs but 1 person, 1 or more computers specifically designed, manufactures and sold for mining along with electricity cost. You had to invest to be able to invest, or you could just buy BTC directly and hope you got the timing right (or bought consistently over time). Similar with Ethereum we saw farms/investors scalping the markets for GPU's, their prices rising and demand being skyhigh so they could corner the mining for those newly generated coins.
So, both of them required you to A. Invest in equipment, equipment that a middleman profited from by selling it to you. B. Invest with electricity, money you could've spent just buying BTC or ETH to begin with and C. Wear and tear on your equipment and the general noise and heat as a byproduct, not to mention the effects on the climate it had (which were never substantial really).
Let's get back to Hive, one could argue that the early "bad" distribution puts us in the same corner as BTC and ETH, but we've had such a long runway of generally low price with many accounts powering up and back down that I believe very few of the initial miners are still around, those who are are most likely good actors who believe in the tech and what it enables for people to have stuck around this long. It's been 7 years of mostly low price, even the very few that managed to buy at a relative high price must be somewhat even at this point if they've remained staked and active in the network. Would it have been great if Steemit hadn't attempted to get most of the stake early on and built a more solid distribution plan while allowing anyone and everyone to fairly mine it? Sure, but nothing is perfect and a fair distribution is very difficult to achieve. We saw this with ex-steemit employees launching their own koin much later on and still deal with similar pitfalls.
The main difference is the continued distribution of Hive. It's been years where most of the inflation goes to content and curators, something anyone and everyone can become and something many have.
There's a lot of talks in the crypto space against DPOS because DPOS to them usually means EOS, the currency that people invested billions into because it was so fast and allowed for so much smart contracts etc yet aside from a few gambling dapps and games I'm honestly unsure if there's anything going on there at the moment as I haven't heard about it for so long. I made a joke some time ago that Hivers have changed the meaning of EOS to "end of season" when they discussing their monthly 
Why is DPOS disliked? Well, they're not completely wrong, they usually refer to cartels which sounds dubious but it's really quite easy to understand and we do partly have some of those around on Hive as well, although not as efficient and sinister as over on EOS. You see, EOS' inflation only goes out to blockproducers, you could compare this on Hive as if all Hive rewards only went to the witnesses. If that's the only thing being rewarded, then that's where all of the focus is. Sure you can build tools, services or brand yourself "EOS-counter/city" to maybe get some votes by other EOS holders but self-interest is almost always going to concur. "If they're producing blocks, why am I not?" Setting up block production on EOS can't be much harder than it is to set up a Hive witness, it may require more expensive infrastructure but those with stake can afford it, and those with stake are going to vote themselves in. Once they've done that, they're going to look for who else to vote, naturally let's vote for others voting for me as I profit from that directly. With the low lockup time on EOS, this unfortunately allowed exchanges to participate in block producing as well. Here's a screenshot of their top block producers I just took, hadn't looked in ages but wasn't surprised of the current standings:
3/5 are exchanges, unsure if they share the rewards with their customers. Point being, if Hive's inflation only consisted of block production and we didn't have a longer power down period, we'd most likely see the same thing here because why wouldn't they? Instead we don't have such a focused "cartel" voting of our witnesses, I can't speak for everyone but I usually don't vote for the top witnesses and spread my votes out a bit, some times I leave some that are close to falling off if I think they deserve to continue be in the top.
Okay, time to get back on topic.
What I like about Hive is that anyone can create an account, anonymously if they choose. They can then remain anonymous as long as they like but that anonymity may break when they're looking to cash in some of the Hive they've earned. For instance if I wanted to sell some of my Hive I'd send it to Binance which requires KYC as do most other exchanges, even if they didn't and you want to withdraw them to your bank account/card, you'd give away your name by withdrawing from the exchange onto your bank. The only way this can be avoided is if you use some kind of service such as localbitcoins where you exchange Hive into BTC/other alt, then that alt for cash in an ATM/through a seller that only asks for your username and to transfer the funds when you meet up with them in exchange for cash/bank transfer.
Some may give away their anonymity the same way buy wanting to buy Hive through exchanges.
The great thing about Hive, though, is that if you're someone skeptic about crypto in general, want to remain anon about your involvement and to try it out, Hive allows that. It let's anyone almost easily at this point in time create an account for free for now and you can exchange your activity, effort and knowledge for earnings through curation. Imagine what that means exactly. You can skip all the steps about having to purchase coins off of exchanges, risking giving away your identity, you can skip having to invest in hardware to mine it and giving away your identity to the sellers. Anonymity is often thought of that these people have something to hide or that they have ulterior motives down the line, it's kind of like the Snowden quote:
Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
although it's a bit longer but the second part brings up another strength of Hive. Some people may just be tired seeing countless of websites, services and other entities hacked and their data being out there sold to bad actors. Maybe some live in countries where this technology is forbidden due to fear of taking undermining their fiat system. There's plenty of reasons to want to stay anonymous and on Hive we can't judge anyone other than based on their actions and words.
I used to like Reddit based on the ease of new account creation and giving people the right to "say something on their mind at the moment" without giving away their main account where others may be able to siphon out who he is based on the history. These were called "throwaway accounts" and while they're not as easily created on Hive you can consider some to be that. The immutability of text also makes people more careful of what they say and post on chain knowing it'll be there forever but the anonymity of it all gives them the freedom to speak their minds without fear of "real life" retaliation or consequences, for better or worse.
I know a lot of accounts on Hive who've started from nothing and made their way up to a sizeable account while remaining fully anonymous. Either through posting and curating, working on some things with their dev skills and being rewarded for it in exchange, or dabbling with layer two tokens, etc. Some of them don't even know what they'll do with it come next pump as it's become harder and harder to remain anonymous while withdrawing back to fiat, while some of them don't even plan to but instead can rely on HBD now to trade into and try to retain their value and grow it in the market cycles. These I'm sure are special cases, though, as most users on Hive don't have a problem using their stake how they see fit for both onchain things and off-chain which is a good segue to the other thing mentioned in the title.
On Hive anyone can see anyone's wallet balance and transactions, this isn't as common in crypto as one might think because there people don't just go out and tell everyone what their crypto addresses are. Even with services such as EMS or using wallets for certain dapps where one could doxx their address to others the ease of creating new addresses there and moving coins around through mixers or exchanges makes it hard for anyone to know their real holdings. This is of course a privacy not many mind, especially not coming from web2 and it is something that's possible on Hive as well if you want to go through the effort. Your main account here is important, though, as it reflects on you, your earnings, your history, actions and words that are tied to your wallet. While I don't think many judge people for powering down and selling, or at least not when they curate them, it does play a role in the overall experience of Hive. I've mentioned it before, but it's hard to know what someone goes through in life, what they may need the value they've earned on Hive for, etc. They could of course talk about it, and many do, but they could also lie. I think this is something that plays a bigger part if it's something that constantly and consistently happens. I know some people who've been around for ages, even as long as me and been just as active and rewarded, yet they have no stake left. They either really needed the rewards or they don't really believe in Hive as much as others here do, it's close to impossible to know the truth. That's not what I was going to talk about regarding this, though. More importantly are the aspects of "putting your money where your mouth is" when it comes to what you talk about and believe.
On #web2 you can often hear people put a currency down while praising something else, but when it comes to knowing how much of both coins they own it's quite impossible to know that. Similar thing I've noticed with traders who actively trade and post TA's and ideas of where they think the market is moving. They're happy to show you insane returns in terms of percentages but shy away from showing you how much they're actually trading with and if you ask it's considered rude. Here you can check how much an account owns of a certain token or nft for instance, it's usually bound to their account. If someone's talking about investing in a certain L2 token then he better have some of it himself, else you may start to question why he's posting positively about it if he has the funds to put his money where his mouth is.
There's a lot of things that are different between Hive and the rest of #web3 you often hear about ironically on #web2 and I really like most of them. Some of these aspects can of course also be used for bad as is quite common with new technology that allows for a lot more "freedom", but I think this post is getting long enough by now. I have found though that accounts that do well and in general are "good people" and their reputation mixed with their age and activity of having remained "good people", the platform will continue to treat them well. My reputation on Hive is something I've considered to be priceless because it enables me so many things and generates value in so many forms I couldn't see myself getting rid of it.
Alright, to end this post. I think curation on Hive is something quite unique in the space along with how it distributes value and inflation out to people. We need to continue treating it better and not take it for granted, both from those curating and those receiving curation. It's the thing I fell in love with when I first got here and have quite enjoyed it ever since. It's a bummer that the rest of the space hasn't given us the light of day that we deserve yet, either cause they're too busy with their own coins or see DPOS as a failure due to past history and their founders, but I firmly believe our time will come and I'm looking forward to being able to curate more and more new users joining the space, whether they decide to remain anonymous or not and whether they decide to remain staked or not. Everyone has a chance to partake in the distribution of Hive as long as the community agrees with it.
