photo credit Boba Jaglicic 
Today, as we begin 2021, we are seeing a an all time low in dollars in Hive. Whereas BTC is seeing all time highs. Why is this happening? Bitcoin promotion has had a ten year head-start. When you have dollars and you want to buy Hive you have to go through Bitcoin first. It is the recognized name of Cryptocurrency. It is more than that though.
chart available from Tradeview
The original Alternatives
Bitcoin came out of the financial crisis of 2008. There are various features of Bitcoin. What makes it different from fiat is: decentralized, peer-to-peer, permissions with cryptographic signatures, and backed by nothing. These properties are necessary for Bitcoin to exist.
Prior to Bitcoin electronic money systems were created that did not have these properties and they were shutdown. They were shutdown because they didn't have these properties. The Liberty Dollar existed prior to Bitcoin in the late 1990s by someone who had studied money and was concerned about price rises. The Liberty Dollar - the organization - faced problems: Federal agencies confiscated the precious metals that were backing the money. The creator faced a 22 year prison sentence for counterfeiting. Charges that really didn't apply to what he was doing.
Image from libertydollar.org
The Liberty Dollar was an effort to re-introduce silver and gold backed dollars to the economy. They were explicitly private dollars, because they couldn't create 'legal tender' dollars. So you may not be able to convert your US dollars to gold but these new dollar would be backed by gold. The intention was this alternative would force the Fed to not create so much new currency (not so much inflation). That is, there would create less money and there would be no more price increases.
www.e-gold.com (currently only a blog)
E-Gold was like PayPal but with the money denominated in Gold rather than dollars. This actually pre-dated the Liberty Dollar by two years. The creator, Douglas Jackson, was arrested as well and forced to cease operations.
These two projects were private efforts to create a harder money than the U.S. dollar alternative. Something you could save in. They were backed by something and using a corporation or legal entity of some kind. You cannot have backing unless there is some company behind it. They were vulnerable to legal attack.
How is Bitcoin like the Liberty Dollar and E-Gold?
Bitcoin is a deliberate attempt to create a harder money than the US dollar. The features of Bitcoin that were not strictly necessary include its shrinking inflation rate. Which is setup to never exceed 21,000,000 coins.
There are many people who thought and think the same way Doglas Jackson and Bernard von NotHaus. One such person or group is Satoshi Nakamoto.
How is Bitcoin not like E-Gold?
The creator (or creators) of Bitcoin needed to remove the Napster like properties of e-Gold, and replace them with the Bittorrent properties. Bitcoin involves much more than this. Many features had to come together to make it enough like Bittorrent that it couldn't be easily stamped out. There is one single important feature that has nothing to do with those concerns. That core feature isn't technical in terms of getting around the problem of government interference is the issuance policy. By creating fewer and fewer on a schedule halving every four years, the inflation of Bitcoin eventually will stop.
Why Hive?
Whereas file sharing and money have become Peer-to-peer and decentralized. Social media had not in 2015. Hive's software was made for content platforms, a reputation system, and to reward content creators and curators. All with no cost to participate. That is what it was made for.
Hive, the blockchain, is a common social-media back-end for participating sites. The blockchain also works with three currencies: Hive, Hive Power and Hive Dollars as part of its backend. Web Sites can join and use Hive or leave at anytime. Just like participants of the Bitcoin network. There are also public RPC nodes which mean sites can use Hive without operating a node at all! Bitcoin has no such thing.
With people being banned and censored these days on social media, Hive has become a safe place for bloggers to go. There are many places you can interact with the Hive blockchain: ecency.com, leofinance.io, hive.blog, d.buzz, peakd.com. Should one of these sites go down, you can go to another or fire up your own. You can find more sites at https://hiveprojects.io/projects/ .
There platforms can easily block certain posts in their front-ends if they want to but the same Hive back-end is the same for at least five complete social media platforms: ecency.com, leofinance.io, peakd.com, d.buzz, and hive.blog. You only need to post once on one of these for the post to appear in all of them.
So the real value of Hive is not in its token. 
@unklebonehead/for-the-boomers
Places like Facebook and Twitter are companies in business to make money. They use you and I as a product to sell to advertisers.
But with hive, there is no company. There is no CEO and no shareholders to be beholden to!
With hive being a blockchain technology there is also a crypto currency. That you automatically get and accumulate just for being active. This means that since you now own hive YOU are an owner of the whole network!
Hive puts the internet back in the hands of the people. Your voice has a value. Your voice has meaning and nobody can ever silence your voice or delete you.
It's set up similar to a representative republic. Where you get to vote for witnesses (the governance) and what projects and apps you think will benefit you.
With Hive you get ownership and freedom of speech unparalleled on the internet.
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