Hi!
In this article, I'm going to compare a couple of networks from the perspective of a tiny fish. I think that the fact that Hive doesn't have transaction fees within the network should be something to be very proud of. The absence of fees should really be a thing to highlight when getting new people onboard HIVE.
Ethereum Experience
Let's say you want to stake 200$ worth of ETH on Harvest Finance as I did. First, you have to move ETH to the wallet, then buy x asset to bind with ETH. Already you have made quite a many signings because you also have to approve both ETH and x asset on Sushiswap. Now you go back to Harvest Finance, a couple of more approvals, and then staking. After that, you can enjoy some good APYs but it will take you a long time to get even to that 200$ of ETH.
All of us who have been providing liquidity and staking, know that the APY percentage usually falls drastically over time. So if you are not ready to withdraw but instead want to change to a more lucrative LP pair, well with a small initial deposit your gains will be eaten up by ETH fees.
So this was definitely not for me and for the above reasons mentioned, do not recommend it to my fellow small-timers either.
Just few easy steps that can cost quite a bit...
SmartBCH Example
Next stop was SmartBCH. I invested a small amount to this protocol called Goblins Cash. It's got staking with about 10% 5-day ROI. It also has some bond discounts and when the discount % went to about 20%, I would unstake, buy a bond and when some of it had vested, I'd claim that and stake again.
This includes lot of signing and if SmartBCH had fees like Ethereum for example, it simply wouldn't be beneficial. Luckily, SmartBCH has about $0.02 fees in BCH so even Vitalik would probably be happy about that.
So with that DAO, I made 4X profit on my initial deposit but it could have easily been cut in half if it were on some more expensive chain. This is a little off-topic, but can you guess to which network I then moved those profits? Oh yes, there. Puff!
From Avalanche to Polygon and to Hive
Meanwhile, I was also interested in some dapps on Avalanche. You can imagine that with ~200$ worth of AVAX and paying something like 1-2$ for everything you do isn't really how to make a profit as a small fish. Trader Joe... more of a Robber Joe.
I had read a couple of articles about PolyCub and decided to give it a go. Then I withdrew everything I got on Avalanche, again paying those hefty fees, and finally bridged it to Polygon.
You should have seen my smile when there was this notification on Metamask saying, "network is congested and fees may be higher than usual" and below that was a $0.01 fee ready to be confirmed.
As you all know, with Hive it gets even better. After PolyCub(still strongly staking there!), I started to take more interest in Hive. To me, it's really impressive that I can make a little profit by trading HIVE to HBD and vice versa without paying insane fees for every operation. Or imagine if you had to pay that Avalance-like fee for trading DEC, SPS, STARBITS, etc...
In Conclusion
I guess I'm the type of investor who likes to make many, fast moves within a network. So I've moved away from chains with large fees. I'm still on SmartBCH, Polygon, Terra and Fantom. All of those with tiny fees. And Hive, of course.
I don't know about you guys but if and when I'm telling someone about Hive, I'm certainly going to talk about these examples to underline the fact that there are significant differences between the network fees. So perhaps they'll take it into future consideration that it can be costly within the network or it can be very cheap. Or even free like with Hive. This is a huge advantage for Hive.
That's all, thank you for reading!