Many of us have been calling for gutting inflation rewards on the common reward pool for years now, and I still remain firmly in support of this move. Or at least an interim solution that sees inflation drop to 2% or so, before we have the vision for a complete overhaul.

Another reason to get into cryptocurrencies is to use them as transactional currencies and to facilitate payments. I think this is where Hive can excel. We can take advantage of 3-second block times, free transactions, and personalized account names. These are features that many end-users want.

While this was certainly a legit use case for Steem in 2016, I'm afraid this is no longer relevant.

1. The DPoS consensus mechanism has proved to be a catastrophic failure, and after the Steem debacle no one will trust this network with any significant value. DPoS cultists love to point how the fork proves that it works, but it really doesn't. Steem is still under 51% attack, and will forever be. Despite how flawed PoW is, this would never happen there.

2. Even if people were OK with the severe decentralization and security compromises DPoS brings, there's a far superior version of it out there in EOS. They have raised $4 billion, pushed hard on various fronts, and still failed to capture any meaningful economic activity. Hive has no chance.

3. But that brings me to the biggest issue, all of this is now possible on Ethereum. ZK Rollups are the single greatest innovation in crypto since bitcoin invented blockchain, and ethereum made it programmable, in my opinion. Today, we have services like Loopring Pay and zkSync which offer <$0.01 transfers with 0.3 second finality for ALL ERC-20 assets. Other dApps like Gods Unchained are also starting to integrate similar technologies, and I'd imagine within a few months scalability will no longer be an issue on ethereum. Wallets are starting to integrate ENS names. E.g. you could open on account on Status with ats-david.snt.eth for free; or pay something to secure ats-david.eth or ats-david.crypto or whatever. So the account names thing is no longer an advantage either. And of course, all of this achieved with the massive decentralization, security and network effects ethereum brings.

Today, there are only 25 people at most who can run Hive profitably. IMO, there is only one or two of these with any sort of credibility and reputation in the crypto space, most of them are random yahoos, conspiracy theorists and opportunists (No offense meant, you know this is true). Do you think people would trust this network, with a history of consensus failure, with any kind of significant value? I certainly wouldn't and no one I have spoken to with any real stake in crypto will either. As a contrast, the Ethereum 2.0 Medalla testnet has 100,000 validators, with more likely being present for Ethereum 2.0 when it launches. That is what massive decentralization looks like. This is the very steep cost to giving away free transactions without a revolutionary technology like ZK Rollups to optimize them.

Finally, Reddit is introducing tokenization on ethereum with some scaling solution like zk Rollups (they haven't decided yet). Why on earth would anyone use Hive?

In my opinion, the best case scenario for Hive now is to completely overhaul the system to be a niche outlet for social media and gaming.

PS: Hive is #151 on Coingecko today. Damn, how far we done fell. This is now the single greatest failure in crypto, for what was once a top 3 project.