Months ago Keychain got a big update to the interface. I remember this well because I actually saw the upgrade go live in real time. The app crashed and then when I logged in it looked completely different. For the most part it was a pretty nice upgrade.
Yikes! I'm down 40k Hive from my all time high. Very sad. I guess I have work to do. In any case, we can see there are certain minor changes that went into play on the frontend. The settings and preferences section is much more streamlined as well. I only had on problem with it.
Claiming.
I like being able to see how much I'm going to claim before I claim rewards. This was removed. Now when you click the claim button it just claims no matter how much money is in there. Kinda threw me off at first because I've already been Pavlov trained into clicking the button thinking I'll have a choice to claim or not.
It's one of those weird small things that shouldn't even register, but it does. And I'm slightly annoyed by it to the point of claiming rewards on peakd.com. Such a small thing that shouldn't even matter but my ritualistic behavior has changed because of it.
I think this is a great example of how tiny little details can make a huge difference as to how people use an app (or if they use it at all). I bet most people haven't given this chance a single thought, or if they did they liked that it was streamlined to a single click. Who cares how much money is there to claim? Just claim it. That's how most people approach claiming rewards on Hive (in fact many just auto-claim with the bot function).
Speaking of auto-claim
There was a bug way back in the day that prevented auto-claiming account tokens from working on my computer. Who knows how many months I went on assuming that it was still bugged. Then the developer told me himself that it wasn't bugged, and I was still skeptical (silly). I tested it out and auto-claiming account tokens worked. How long has this feature been working when I assumed it was broken. Just another weird thought for this weird post.
After all, RCs and transactions on Hive are free.
We are going to see a big difference in user experience and behavior on Hive once RCs attain a non-zero value and users have to make decisions as to their actions on the platform. Again this ties back into auto-claiming blog rewards. Far less users will spam transactions claiming a small amount of reward when each of those transactions costs the same amount of RCs. The higher in value RCs goes, the less users will frivolously claim rewards.
Even if those RCs were only worth a penny per claim, it doesn't matter. Any non-zero value will change the behavior of users. This change in behavior spills over into the apps to accommodate and facilitate the new behavior. We see that these kinds of shifts are happening even know while the market value of RCs is zero (no market). Used to be that 10 HP was enough to pretty much do whatever you wanted. Now it's more like 100 HP to have enough RCs to do whatever. The floor is slowly being raised and most people don't even notice or care because why would they it doesn't affect them.
I get a lot of pushback when I post these concepts, and I think a big reason for that is that many of we old-schoolers have essentially been brainwashed by the whitepaper, and we extend that brainwashed view onto the new users and perpetuate that cycle.
Bullet points on Hive whitepaper brainwashing:
- 3 second blocks
- free transactions
- own your account
- account recovery
- proof of brain
Just because it's brainwashing doesn't mean it's not true.
Obviously 3 second blocks, own your account, and account recovery are those things that get hammered in over and over again just like all the other brainwashing, but they are totally true. Huge advantages for Hive as a "social media". Oh, wait... calling Hive a social media is also brainwashing... shoot. Whatever let's move on.
The two big bullet points here that give us a warped sense of perspective are the "free" transaction and "proof of brain". Of those two things "proof of brain" brainwashing is by far the most damaging, as it has led to multiple ugly flag-wars with massive diminishing returns. See that? Even the term 'flag' vs 'downvote' is a thing. Weird.
But let's focus on "free transactions"
What happens when a market for RCs pops up because RCs start being difficult to get and new users are looking to get more. It costs A LOT of RCs to claim an account. We can avoid this cost by paying 3 Hive to create the account, so already we see that Hive has a floor value of
RCs-to-claim-account / 3
Each Hive buys 1/3rd of an account on Hive.
So imagine there is a large group of new users looking to get RCs. They're willing to pay more than this floor value for the RCs. Again, the floor value is pretty high. If I was able to trade my account tokens for 3 Hive that's an extra 12k Hive for me (not too shabby). We need to start thinking of Hive as the world's first blockchain that yield-farms bandwidth using stake, because that's where this is leading.
What will happen when people realize Hive transactions aren't free?
Riot? There's going to be a lot of complaining. There's really no other way around it considering how ridiculously we've been marketing "free transactions" this entire time (to the point of me calling it "brainwashing"). There's no such thing as a "free transaction" in crypto. This is a necessary part of blockchain to ensure that we don't get DDOSed and Sybil attacked. Paying for service is a robust solution compared to all the bullshit that WEB2 has to deal with. Much more efficient and scalable and will actually work because users get paid in a WEB3 atmosphere (which more than pays for the fees).
Centralization
Back to Hive keychain... It's important to realize that Keychain itself is a centralized attack vector on a centralized operating system potentially controlled by hackers and the three-letter agencies. Lot's of people plop their keys in there without giving it a second thought. I feel like I shouldn't have to explain why a chrome extension isn't the most secure option, but I definitely do.
Decentralization.
Keychain can make calls to any Hive node. That's decentralized. Keychain also doesn't store owner keys, making it much harder (impossible exploiting only keychain) to steal accounts even if the active key is compromised. That's decentralized. So there are a lot of different factors in crypto to consider. Consider that decentralization is a spectrum and trying to simplify the issue down to black and white true/false answers is ignorant.
Conclusion
This post is kinda all over the place because only talking about they keychain update wasn't really enough content. For the most part it's nice to see how the grind of development continues. It's also important to mention that infrastructure isn't sexy or profitable; it's just that thing in the background that most people don't even think about. Still, just like a beating heart or lungs that process air into oxygen without us having to think about it... infrastructure is pretty damn important.
Also, transactions on Hive are not free: they cost RCs. RCs are not free because powering up Hive isn't free. There's an extra layer here that throws people off because they were going to power up Hive anyway for other reasons. Many view RCs as the free icing on the cake, and that's fine, for now. This won't be the case when we run out of bandwidth on our 65KB blocks. This is all a process, but it's obvious to me a lot of habits will need to change when bandwidth runs out. Say goodbye to those "lol" single-word comments.