For the last ten days I've been stepping away from crypto a bit.
Been trying to detox off doomscrolling on Twitter and just overall spending too much time on social media (including Hive). Also dealing with some personal issues and crypto news has just been downright boring lately. I've been put in a position these last few weeks to read a lot of crypto news, and hot damn is crypto news boring right now. Even with everything going on all anyone can talk about is the price and regulatory overreach.
Of course the only reason people talk about regulatory overreach is once again to speculate on the price, so it just gets annoying after a while. Nobody actually seems to care if the government actually comes in and imperializes the blockchain. They just want to know if that will make number go up or down. And there are many many cases to be made in both directions.
For example if XRP sales get deemed to be an unregistered security, this could easily have a positive price impact for several reasons:
- Maybe we get some clarity and it could actually be registered.
- After registration the XRP token would have access to markets that no other crypto asset has.
- Most of us do not hold XRP because of the heinous premine, and thus if they lose it's no big deal but if they win the entire cryptosphere will go on a rampaging bull run in the wake of extreme SEC weakness.
- If a token even has the possibility of being regulated by the SEC, then it's not decentralized anyway and we shouldn't even care what happens to it. Live & learn.
- The layer zeros of these communities are wildly underestimated (just like Hive's was during the hostile takeover). It doesn't matter that XRP has a heinous premine. They are strong enough to make it work no matter what happens. They aren't going to give up. I think that much is pretty obvious.
- If XRP sales are deemed a security it's possible the government itself would destroy the heinous Ripple premine. How is that not bullish? Basically half of the supply would vanish entirely. Of course the community would have to figure out how to pay devs to continue Ripple's work... so there is that.
- Regulatory overreach is good for crypto long-term. It hurts in the short term because OMG FUD but in the long-term it not only flushes all the current garbage down the toilet, but also stops future devs from thinking they can get away with the same game plan.
IM SPECULATING!!!!1
So what do I think will happen with the price of Bitcoin & Hive? Nothing has changed. I'm still on the HODL path of waiting until late May and refactoring then. Nothing to report here. Still hoping for that Summer bull run after the bear-market-end to hopefully kick in.
I do think it's a bit wild that Bitcoin did not pull back during the bearish 2-week cycle and just rammed against $28k resistance this entire time. I still somewhat expect a pullback to $25k to confirm our last resistance as support, but every day that goes by it just... doesn't happen. Best we got was $27k, and even then all the speculatoors were losing their mind talking about a 'dip'. These people have no shame I tell you. 3.5% drop and they start freaking out. This is a day ending in 'y'.
It's wild.
The psychic vampire of the markets is in their heads for sure. This is why it's good to step away every once and a while. I went for multiple days without checking the price of anything. When's the last time you did that, anon?
Some bad news:
Muh witness team is having technical difficulties trying to build a full-node. Very sad. Full-node APIs are badass and we should have done this a long time ago. I actually feel like such an idiot about speculating on the market when I should just be cashing out during the bull and catalyzing Hive development instead. Oh well. Vote for 
I really should be taking more of an active roll in all of this. I do have a lot of ideas about how our full-nodes could be scaled up a bit better. Hive seems to have a tendency to get overloaded. One node goes down, and then the apps that relied on that node auto-switch to other, which in turn overloads that node: creating a domino effect that sometimes results in all the nodes going into denial of service. Too much bandwidth to process. I have a few ideas about how to avoid such cascades but I really have been slacking on the dev side of things for a while now. Need to up my game for sure.
Conclusion
Tax season is ending. Ethereum is doing the Shanghai upgrade in four days. Hive and Bitcoin are unregulatable. Ripple might win their lawsuit (which would be downright hilarious). Development continues regardless of vapid price action. Nuff said.