It's been a hell of a ride and we're just getting started here on Hive and I've been thinking a lot about what the future looks like here. As of now, it's official. Hive is the new Steem. We'll probably lose a few apps in the transition, but we've passed the "this might end up being another Whaleshares" phase.

While some were slower than others, all the key dapps are coming over. That's great. Now we have to turn to the problems we've always had. The good news is that without an overlord over us mismanaging everything, we actually have opportunity to do things different, maybe even better! :D I see some people saying Hive is an oligarchy. I don't really get this. Some people have more stake than others. Those people have more influence. Decentralization is not a boolean. It's a spectrum, and this is the most decentralized we've ever been as a community. It's up to individuals to decentralize further by buying or earning Hive. It's no surprise that the people that are the most invested, get even more invested when opportunities knock. That's not something to be frowned upon IMO.

Anyway, what this post is about is what I think is our best bet at making this system sustainable and better yet something that can thrive. Some of the ideas I've seen mostly revolve around further incentivising and rewarding staking and in one form or another, punishing or devaluing selling.

I think we've already pushed this concept pretty far while not focusing at all on the real variable that will add value to the system which is monetization or new money coming in and staying in.

Here is the big picture of what I'm envisioning.

• The community funds the development or buys software and adds it to our "suite" of open source tools that we offer to developers and users.
• Monetization is built into these features that in one way or another adds direct tangible value to the overall system. Ex. burning tokens or funding the dao.
• It would be up to the community to patronize or not patronize applications that "if using "our" software, made sure to send value back to the community.

Examples

1. Jimmy's Digital Marketplace App

Jimmy creates a proposal to develop or have developed an open source decentralized digital marketplace app that can be integrated on frontends at the account level so that each Hive account can have a "store" where they can sell digital goods. Since Communities are just accounts, they can have stores as well. 10% of each sale goes to the dao. Jimmy's proposal is funded and we pay him to continue developing the app through the dao.

Apps that use this application are expected to leave the community cut unchanged if they want to get support from the community. It would then be up to the community to support or not support applications that could potentially fork the code to cut them out. Which I doubt people would do.

Also since Jimmy is continuing to develop and improve the app, if someone does a fork, they now have to maintain their fork themselves. I think it would be the path of least resistance to just use the app as is and be in harmony with the community.

1. Yuki's Fundraising App

Yuki creates a fundraising application that can be integrated into frontends allowing any user at any time to create a funding campaign for anything and track, and receive funding from the community. The app is really well designed, user friendly, and widely adopted.

As a community, we make Yuki an offer to sell us her application which we open source and add to our "suite" of tools offered to help bootstrap developers into our system. We pay Yuki to continue to develop the application through the dao and now all successfully funded campaigns pay a percentage of their funding to either the dao or burns tokens by sending them to Hive account@null, whichever one adds the most value, maybe both.

Using this structure we can create a virtuous circle of development and value addition and creation. By keeping this value open source we only ever add value. Someone can fork any one of our applications and close source their fork. If they dramatically improve it, we can make them an offer. This could create competition to create the next best version of each app and any new developer that looks at Hive will have a ton of tools to start with for building their applications.

This would also shield us from situations like Steemworld.org right now where an emotional beef leads to us losing an application that many users value and want.

As a side note, I think we should also leverage traditional crowdfunding services like Kickstarter/GoFundMe/Patreon in this as well. It's my opinion that too much here revolves around stake. The vast majority of users here have little to no impact on the HPS or whatever we're calling it, but also the vast majority of users here could afford to fund a crowdfunding campaign for something they felt like would add value to their investment here. I'm not too proud to use these services that work if they will ultimately make us stronger. I'll use anything at my disposal.

This is our current situation and it's unsustainable. Even if we increase staking incentives we still haven't created any new value, we've only doubled down on bad economics IMO that says "we value you not ever selling your tokens".

What value is there in a harvest that can't be reaped?

Are we just waiting until more people buy in after us so that we can dump on them? That's not an economy, that's a pyramid scheme, a very elaborate one, but still, it's just a pyramid scheme.

Where I'd like us to go is having multiple inroads for new money to come in based on actual real world value being created, then having those new funds be able to be circulated in the community as much as possible.(People using their Hive to buy things with Hive) and with these two things working together, ultimately building a future where they outpace the selling and inflation, and because we have a token with real value and a real use case we won't have to bribe people to keep powering up and please don't sell. We have to get out of that mentality IMO.

What we currently do in the best case scenario is give developers a fertile ground to grow their apps with a pre-existing userbase, but in most cases the blockchain does not directly support these developers. Maybe users do via upvotes to their reports or something like that, but in this situation, if someone creates something that's wildly successful, THEY DID US A FAVOR, and we did very little for them, therefore they don't owe us anything. If anything, we owe them. In this case if they decide to go to another blockchain, we're screwed and we can't really be mad. They provided us with a cool app/service and we used it. End of value exchange. So while they might do really well individually, the system doesn't necessarily. I think we can dramatically improve this, by not only "bringing successful apps into the fold", but also providing them with more and more tools to get started. That way the value exchange is a bit more balanced and more developers and users will want to build and invest here.

Basically I think we need to become something like how Autodesk works. Autodesk makes Autocad, Maya, 3DSMax, and others. They basically have a monopoly on 3D software, not totally, but just about. If someone creates a plugin that's great, they buy them out and add that feature to the software. They also bought out all their competition. We're a long way from buying out competition but what a paradigm shift that would be.

What do you all think? Let me know in the comments.