There are many key factors that contribute to making a cryptocurrency a viable long-term investment. Whether it's the scale of the problem it seeks to address, the market share it may end up capturing, the team(s) behind the project, or available capital from passionate investors. While I tend to focus mostly on those factors, in that order, when it comes to altcoins, knowing its resilience in the face of a bear market or other challenges is also key.
Here's why I believe Hive is one of the most resilient blockchains out there, and why that ought to be seen as one main argument for its viability as a token in an altcoin portfolio.
HIVE as a project has proved many times to be resilient, is it the best reason to believe in it as a long term investment? Image credit hive.io
Some relevant history of the importance of resilience in crypto
It's almost been 4 years since I got into cryptocurrency investing and trading. Looking back to the spring of 2017, perhaps the first great alt season, it's odd to remember all the promising coins that were being hyped that are now nowhere to be seen. It's also interesting to remember what arguments and logic were being presented to suggest buying one altcoin over another. While there was a lot of wanna-be experts and bedroom analysis of fundamentals, some of it inevitably turned out to be correct. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while.
One such key factor is a project's resilience and likelihood to endure a bear market. With tonnes of ICO's for new projects claiming to be "the next Uber, but decentralized", "the next Airbnb, but decentralized", "the next Spotify, but decentralized", "the next insert-successful-Silicon-Valley-StartUp, but decentralized", etc. It was clear that many were launched by teams that wanted to ride the ICO hype-train, but had no actual interest in the product technology or in solving the problem that it had the potential (or not) to address.
It was obvious (or at least it should have been) that many of those projects, while maybe holding some potential, would quickly see its core team quit at any significant downturn in price. And why wouldn't they if they didn't care about the project really? It was, therefore, key to either diversify properly to ensure your portfolio contained at least a few "stayers". Although at the time throwing a dart at a printed screencap of Coinmarketcap was likely to still give better results than not getting into crypto.
But the importance of a project's resilience, whether it be through the commitment of the founding team, the amount of community support, or established need by secondary businesses and/or projects that have adopted the blockchain and thus rely on its continued development, is still as important as ever. It really should be one of the first things one looks at when considering picking up new altcoins now that many believe a new alt season will be coming following Bitcoin's new ATH.
HIVE's proven resilience
If there are any altcoins below the top 100 by market cap that have proven to be more resilient than HIVE, then I would love to know which ones they are so that I can pick up a few. Following severe disagreements with the new owners of Steemit Inc one year ago, the Hive community showed a commitment to following its own vision of a truly decentralized chain in a way that no other coins I know of have. It had to withstand a hostile take-over, code its own fork, get the new token listed and recognized on the world's largest exchanges, replace several of the infrastructure services previously provided by Steemit Inc, and organize and continue its own development.
Now almost a year since then, the blockchain's development has kept on going seamlessly. Regular developer meetings are taking place, with recordings shared to the community for feedback and engagement, new independent project teams have both formed and grown significantly (perhaps most notably LeoFinance, and some new and exciting features are being worked on that will enable HIVE to do things that STEEM can't.
All of this has kept on going despite the price mostly going down (together with many other altcoins) during Bitcoin's recent rally to $50k+. The fact that despite all this, the different teams contributing to HIVE have no interest in going anywhere, tells something about the chain's risk profile and likelihood to succeed. Sure, many challenges still exist from sufficiently addressing a real market need, to developing more user-friendly products, and marketing them sufficiently, but while many other coins carry the risk of its team abandoning the project, Hive doesn't seem to have that.
And with different and independent projects such as 
So what do you think? Is resilience the most important argument one should make when suggesting HIVE as a decent long-term investment? What other factors do you consider when considering an altcoin?
Let me know in the comments!
Exxp is a plugin that my team has made for the Hive blockchain, you can find it in the WordPress plugin store here or learn more at our website on exxp.io