Hive witnesses are pretty weird.
- They are block producers.
- They are sort of like politicians.
- It's kind of like an oligarchy (that can be voted out instantly).
- There isn't a lot of competition to get into the top 100, so far.
- But there's a ton of competition to get top 20.
- We depend on them to run this entire shabang.
But what will Hive look like in five or ten years?
What's the ten year plan? I'd honestly say that decentralized architecture lacks any kind of real plan. We have several centralized agents all doing their own thing and trying to build value around here, and it all comes together to create a weird mishmash of decentralization and flat architecture. Think about pouring water on a table: the water goes everywhere; it has no direction. Every path is explored. Such is blockchain, especially during these early stages.
Scaling up.
Still, the way that Hive is built is very strange. We give all the power to those that are best at allocating capital and retaining value within the system. In essence, ten years down the line, Hive will almost certainly be controlled by twenty billionaires running twenty different massive companies. Gone will be the days that a single person could ever hope to attain a top 20 spot on the roster. Obviously this is both a good and a bad thing. However, we can't stop this evolution from happening. This is just how Hive is built.
Granted, I suppose some "genius" could come along and claim a top 20 spot for himself. I'm sure if Dan came back and was giving 100% he'd easily make it into a top spot. After all, he build the entire core of this system. His knowledge is extensive. I won't hold my breath on that front. He is a worldbuilder, and this world has been built, and I thank him for that.
The point is Hive has chosen a hybrid path.
We are trying to be as centralized as we can while still attempting to avoid the corruption that legacy systems encounter. No easy feat but it should be interesting nonetheless. Also this is a network that anyone can build value permissionlessly. We obviously don't have to be a top 20 witness to make money here.
It stands to reason that if there is a witness team that has 10 people working for it and they are building a lot of value, they should easily make it into the top twenty. This is especially true considering front ends of Hive can easily force their users to vote for their witness (which I'm honestly surprised hasn't happened yet). If we continue on with this extrapolation it becomes clear that a witness with 100 devs would easily take away the top spots from any single person. Thus we can expect each top 20 witness to essentially become the equivalent of a mining pool. Rather than twenty people, it will be almost certainly 20 businesses or perhaps even 20 DAOs with their own token and frontend/service. I expect gaming to be quite popular on Hive. NFTs are the future of gaming. Yada Yada Yada.
But think about how crazy that would be.
Imagine Hive at like $100 or even $1000 per token because the top 20 witnesses are all thriving businesses. Would be pretty wild indeed, and this is exactly what I expect to happen.
Now add the fact that decentralized development turns users into employees.
Get paid to _____.
This is the next thing we must consider. Not only will witnesses be thriving businesses, but also the users themselves become essentially conscripted employees of these frontends/tokens. Imagine being able to craft a skin in a game. Maybe it's a sword in an RPG or a hippy flower necklace, doesn't matter what it is. What matters is who owns it. The user that created the skin owns the skin. Thus the centralized company who develops the product outsources ownership and development to the community itself and can scale up to massive levels.
Conclusion
So think about a top 20 witness that has between 100 and 1000 'real' & 'official' employees, but they also have a million unofficial users helping them build out their product as well. It becomes quite clear exactly how this thing we call WEB3 can scale to enormous levels that no traditional corporation could ever hope to replicate.