Our dear friend Starkerz brought up goofy-voiced Andrew Tate on X and his ridiculous slogan "you just need to get rich", as if it were just that easy for everybody.
https://twitter.com/CTT_Podcast/status/1786458856303829216
- CTT_Podcast
image source
Just buy buildings bro... Just ask your parents for $500,000, you don't need much to start Hustlers University bro.. just get rich.
Or worse, as if anybody would be willing to do whatever it takes to get rich.
If you were presented with the offer of $50,000 per child to kill children. Would you do it?
It's an extreme example and maybe a few would.
Some people are ready to risk it all, I'm aware of that. A handfull of Somali pirates will ride skiffs armed with handguns and grappling hooks against cargo ships who are potentially strapped to the gills in hopes of a payday.
Most of us, however, wouldn't even contemplate the thought. Which doesn't mean we haven't looked at alternative ways of creating wealth. Some of use here have looked beyond the traditional economic systems that we live in and have turned to crypto to find ways of creating value. Hive is one such economic system that allows ANYBODY to create value for others by sharing knowledge, skills or hard work. In return, these Hiveans will receive value in the form of $HIVE tokens, $HBD stable coins or a number of layer 2 tokens built on Hive Engine. They can then take these earnings and power up (in other words stake those tokens in a savings account) to have more influence within the ecosystem and generate passive income, or they could also spend these currencies on goods or sell them for fiat or other currencies.
Here is the central question in my post though: Is the HIVE system just a different system creating inequality outside the traditional economic system? Or is it a system that gives hope to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to earn anything or perhaps only a fraction in a traditional market?
For starters, I see the HIVE blockchain as a level playing field, a place where everybody is able to build wealth with more or less the same opportunities. Anybody can come here and add value to the ecosystem by documenting how they educated a group of people about the benefits of web3 or maybe how they bought school supplies for the local school.
If you are a developer or determined enough to learn programming, you can build tools for other users such as Decentralized exchanges like Leo Dex or payments solutions like V4V.app, and if you're comfortable in front of the camera, heck, you can make tutorials on how to use these tools.
These are just a few of the videos I've made showing folks how to pay a Lightning invoice with Hive Keychain + v4Vapp:
@alex-rourke/dlqfdnft
@alex-rourke/dbzxyzkg
@alex-rourke/wbqphjpp
@alex-rourke/nsxqczdc
@alex-rourke/xhnhspef
If you're a musician or artist, you can make non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and sell them to your fans on one of several marketplaces built on HIVE. Take a look at this example. This is an album I produced for Hivean band 
All 10 copies were sold.
You can check out this piece on 
I also see that some folks are taking whatever HIVE they earned on a blog post to Binance and selling it off for pennies while whales who know the price of HIVE is low are picking it up at a discount to build future wealth.
So my question is: do economic systems naturally have the tendency to form small elite groups? Are web3 economic systems just different tools for rich people to make more riches?
Are parallel economies giving regular folks like me the opportunity to build tech businesses and strengthening the middle class?
I don't have the answer folks. I'm just asking questions and would love to read your thoughts in the comments.
Images in this post were created with Mid Journey and edited in Canva unless sources were provided.