It is our Team Week at the office, which means a lot of workshopping and planning for the next year ahead. It was a pretty busy day with that and I got a message halfway through from my wife that we are going to be homeless, as the entrance work is being done over the next few days and "on second thoughts, we can't live here" - fair enough. It is only two nights - one for me, as I am going to be staying here and trying to get some work done, while Smallsteps and my wife will stay at the grandparent's place a couple kilometres away.
We tend to "see what we want to see" which generally means, our attention and perhaps imagination will manipulate our world to see what is expected, which is often what we surround ourselves with. For me - I see a lot of relationships to Hive, or perhaps it is more like I have stated before, Hive is a reflection of the real world, maintained in a microcosm. As an observer, it is why I have always found Hive so interesting.
In the workshops today we were looking at the hurdles of project implementation and technology adoption, with the main speaker introducing various models to approach this. While 4 out of the 5 were very familiar already, the problem that was identified pertained to one core thing - communication. It is very, very difficult to do anything that requires some level of social proofing without a decent communication strategy that includes stakeholders in a way that activates them to move.
I think that one of the problems that Hive faces is that there is a lack of uniform narrative around Hive, that it means different things to different people. Centralized technology companies don't have this same problem, as they control the narrative and don't rely on the users to tell the story - just spread the story they introduce. Social media platforms like Facebook were able to spread so fast because they gave a clear message as to what it is for "stay in touch with friends" (while we mine your data and interactions). Not only that - it was "free" to use, meaning there was no barrier for endusers - the cost covered by advertising.
Uptake of technology takes time, but can move very fast with social proof. However, there are other barriers to think about that it seems some don't understand. Being an early adopter is a mindset, not an action. What I mean by this is that there are barriers to entry like cost that are going to affect the uptake, even if people want to be the first to try it. For example, electric cars or solar roof panels would be far more ubiquitous if the cost was a lot less.
I would have had both as soon as possible, but financial availability definitely holds me back - not being a troglodyte or lagger - I am not resistant to change, I am resistant to having to pay the early adopter prices - at least for most things. The reality is that most people who have an early adopter mindset, don't necessarily have the means to early adopt in reality, which is why there are so many people reading about the latest this and that - but not actually owning it.
This is for me a pretty heavy potential for Hive as it allows people to "try crypto and blockchain" with a very, very low barrier of entry, considering the technology, stage of industry lifecycle and potential for gains. What people should keep in mind with early adoption is that what most people consider "getting in" on technology is actually a consumer act, not an investment. Buying the latest gadget doesn't make you special, it just makes you one of the first people to validate a business model as potentially profit churning.
However, not all consumer goods are created equal, as supporting a product is what leads to its further development. We can see what happens when we support a car company or Facebook, Google or the porn industry. What we need to start thinking about is what consumer decisions will lead us to developing products and services that will actually make our lives better - for example, what leads to cleaner air or better health, increased opportunity or improved social stability. Things that might be important.
The problem seems to be that we want the product to be finished before we buy, which means we will criticize and not support something like battery tech in cars for not being good enough or convenient enough in comparison to combustion engines, even though there has been 100 years of development on the engines while not much was moving on the electric motors in this area. Perhaps with a 100 years of support, things would look quite different, including how we generate the electricity they need - while combustion engines will always need oil to burn. Who knows, perhaps there will be a way invented to completely process the exhaust fumes and turn it all into something that benefits our environment and health. I don't think that is a good vision to support though.
I see blockchain, crypto and Hive as visions for the future, something that is not complete but needs support. We are early adopters who hopefully make the model "viable" enough that it will get further developed and start to solve more problems, making it more publicly inclusive - the barrier of entries come down. Even though the price of some components (for example a particular token) can go up, the ubiquity of the technology through society can make some level of it reachable to all, much like most of the technology we are surrounded with today has gone through a thousand iterations based on the support it has received to do so. Very, very little gets developed without market potential - we are the market.
It is an interesting world we are living in now, so much uncertainty while at the same time, there is so much to look forward to technologically. We should really be sitting pretty as a species, yet here we are on the constant brink of war with a million and one things that are making us ill or causing us harm in some way. Perhaps crypto is the kind of technology that helps us rediscover the connection to real value and how we can use it to affect our reality.
People are expecting it to be like the spread of social media, but perhaps it is more electric car. After all, while everyone might want the gains, not everyone is willing to pay the costs.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]