The first initiative on Hive by 
What is HIVE to you?
Technically Hive is a sister chain of Steem, a fork that was created after the battle over influence over Steem between Justin Sun and most of the community had come to an impasse that was impossible to resolve in any other way. The visions the two parties had for Steem were too different and too incompatible. To Justin Sun the Steem blockchain was just another acquisition like in ordinary business world. To him, the idea of having total control over a blockchain was something that he was used to. To us, having a single party in control of a blockchain was in contradiction to the fundamental ideology of the space. Hence, we parted ways.
I do not wish to be a part of the Steem blockchain any longer and I'm powering down all my stake. My intention is to swap my tokens but for something entirely different than Justin Sun conceived all Steemians would swap their tokens for: HIVE, the native token of the Hive blockchain. Hive represents hope for a Delegated-Proof-of-Stake chain to realize the vision of what DPoS chains are supposed to be, a chain with security based on a sufficiently decentralized stake distribution.
What do you want to see HIVE evolve into?
I want to see Hive evolve into the backbone of social media, online publishing and gaming apps: a back end of thousands of apps with tens of millions of users or more in total. I want the stake distribution to be sufficiently decentralized for the level of security to be high and governance fair. For that purpose, I think it is vital for the community and, in particular, the middle class of stakeholders that asserted itself as a the deciding factor in the battle against Sun to hold the witnesses to account. At the present low price of HIVE, one of the 20 consensus witnesses makes about $24,000 per year. That's enough for a part-time salary or a time-consuming hobby. But if the price of HIVE goes $2, a consensus witness will make $240,000 of mostly passive income per year. That is why the stakeholders must pay very close attention to the value each of the consensus witnesses brings to the table. What that means is active development work, a significant part of which could be outsourced at a HIVE token price of $2 or higher. By demonstrating productivity and competence as a developer, a consensus witness can prove competence at securing the chain and finding and fixing technical problems. This is of vital importance.
Even at the current price, a consensus witness should be expected to maintain infrastructure beyond just a witness server. There is a much larger group than the current twenty that is capable of taking over the job. Because consensus witness is currently a job usually done by a single person, I think it's best if those people are as technically competent as possible. At a later time when the job is more frequently done by a team because they money will (hopefully) be better, a witness team can benefit from having a political figure on board.
What do you think about having a large funded DAO for future HIVE development?
At the current low price of HIVE, that is pretty much a requirement for funding for development to be adequate. Consensus witnesses make a little shy of half a million per year in total. That is not enough to hire enough full-time developers with any kind of job security to kick development into high gear.
So, I think a large DAO is needed but the community must be careful about which proposals it votes for. Anyone who applies for funding should write up a detailed plan with clear goals and milestones. Regular reporting should be a requirement for everyone.
What does HIVE mean to you?
For me personally, Hive is a platform on which my online content creation has more potential to capture value than on any other platform without considerable marketing effort. Hive is based on the collaborative spirit of the open source movement. For that reason, if another Hive user creates value and is rewarded for it, I do not lose out. Any branches and outgrowths will enhance the network effect on the entire ecosystem. As a stakeholder, I will gain from each and every development in the ecosystem.
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/markku_jantunen/status/1242524950424104961
- markku_jantunen