HardFork 28 happened recently in Hive, so I thought I'd write about my thoughts on it so far. I'm not at all technical, so I'm looking at this mainly from a user experience / financial perspective.
The HardFork happened while I was away from home, having to use an ancient laptop on a hotel internet whose security was an unknown factor. Because of this, I just keep memo and posting keys on it, not the active key. This might have had an influence on my experience of it !
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The Actual Experience
My experience was that the HardFork created a certain level of disruption to me. I'm pretty sure this is a "me issue", not anything wrong with Hive itself.
Initially, pretty much nothing Hive related worked. I could see posts in Ecency, but other apps and front ends came up as inaccessible - this included PeakD, Beeswap, The BBH Project and Hive Moon.
Over a day or so most of them came back up, although PeakD was inaccessible over the laptop, and now I'm back home was still a mess initially (I freaked when it showed all my wallet balances as zero !) The issue was finally solved when I switched nodes in the PeakD dashboard.
When Ecency came back up, initially all I could do was read posts and make comments. The ability to vote came back about 24 hours later.
HardFork Things That Concern Me
There is one main thing about the HardFork which concerns me, which is the removal of HBD held in the DHF from inflation.
While I completely understand why they've done it, the effect was to create a significant jump in the debt ratio at a time when it's been rising fast due to the drop in the price of HIVE. It's now around 17-18%, with the haircut rule still kicking in at 30%.
The current HIVE price is around $0.10-$0.11 depending on where you look. According to HBDstats.com the debt will support a price of $0.045. When it comes to investments, I'm fairly risk averse for a variety of reasons. Seeing the pattern of HIVE's price drops, I see it that we're 1.5 drops at most away from a haircut. While I am hopeful that the tendency for it to rise a little between drops will prevent that from happening, I'd already taken all my HBD out of savings and converted most of it to HIVE (and then some off-platform to exchanges ready to be converted to stablecoins in due course).
In my own mind, while I am still a huge fan of Hive as a social platform and home for all kinds of Apps, Dapps and games, I now regard HBD as an extremely high risk investment and not a place where I want to keep lots of funds that can grow a return. That's a massive shame.
A minor concern with the HardFork is that the increased focus on curation rewards might attract the kind of people who use AI to make low quality content in the hope of earning easy money. But while that's always been an issue, I don't think it's a big one. I periodically put posts I'm thinking of voting for through an AI detector, and just don't vote for those which show signs of being primarily AI generated.
HardFork Good Stuff
The biggest positive in the HardFork is the change to the curation model. I think it's a massive improvement !
What this change does is make it much more worthwhile to actually engage and create quality content. We still have to watch out for the $0.02 dust threshold, particularly when upvoting comments, but having vote value as fixed means that those who consistently engage should see higher earnings, which should also be reflected in the author rewards we get for creating quality posts.
The simpler methodology will also help new users. It's easier to explain, and will mean that new users with lower vote power will be able to grow their accounts faster as well as feeling that their votes have better value.
Most of the other changes are relatively technical, and I suspect won't change the actual user experience very much (if at all).
But there is one other change which caught my eye, which is stronger enforcement of key authorities. I love this, because it tells me the devs care about security !
Conclusion
Overall, despite a few initial wobbles (which I still suspect were mostly caused by me seeing it while using a laptop that might as well be a Cornflakes packet with a keyboard drawn on the side with a Sharpie), I think the HardFork is a very good one.
I'll have to find other ways to generate fully passive interest type income to replace HBD, but the changes to the curation mechanism easily offset this.
My current plan is to power up a bunch of the HBD I converted to HIVE. The increased HP will increase my vote value. I'll then to curate my little heart out as well as trying to increase my posting rate (quality posts only !) The goal will be to try to earn enough to get the dollar value of my account back to where it was a few months ago, or at least back to more than the value of fiat I put into Hive over the last few years.
