Dear Hivers!
I was worried lately because of Hive prices, as you probably know it was pretty close to ATL (0,1015 $ in 2020.11) when it hit 0,1467 $ at the beginning of this month. As we all know, prices of smaller Coins (alts) are strongly connected with BTC price, so maybe this wouldn't be so bad news, if BTC had a similar price now, like it has in 2020.11. Unfortunately it is not the case (now it was about 49k $, in 2020 it was about 10k $). So, I looked to the chart with btc/hive rate, and this is what I have saw there:
From about the end of 2022 we have had a downward trend with BTC as our pair. This chart doesn't look very optimistic for me...
I started to think, and asked why it may look like this, and of course as much as I managed to find out there are no simple answers. There are many problems with our blockchain and maybe some of them are very important for the price, but maybe with a huge probability price is not connected so much to blockchain flaws but with something completely different like human unrationed decisions etc. I don't think anyone will figure this out, so lets not focus on everything. There is one objective problem, that in my opinion is one of the key reasons for this trend and last alarming price drops. And it is something that can be changed and on what we should focus.
I am far away from an academic expert but what I see is that there are two main ways to develop blockchain coins: similar to real "golden" coin, and similar to nowadays fiat money. Long story short: tokens like BTC have from the start a strict amount of coin that can be mined, so it is a deficit product (like for example gold). It tooks some real energy, resources to get this coin out. But there is another approach, where coins can be produced without limits, more or less it depends on blockchain coin top stakeholders.
First kind of tokens are at first look good as an investment (like gold), but can be hard in future to maintain its utility. Second approach has great risk to lose its value, but also it is easier for it to be used by users in an efficient way.
The problem with the second kind of "mining" coins is that those who are in charge should be very cautious with money production to not overheats blockchain "economy". Too high inflation, and bad mechanics can lead to negative spiral taking down the price of the coin.
Unfortunately, on our blockchain there is a mechanism that can do such a thing (but also it is a necessary mechanism). It is a conversion mechanism which, connected with huge HBD production (High APR for stacked HBD, and DHF), can lead to spiral that will take down to the bottom price of our coin. You can check inflation caused by this mechanism in a very important post written by @dalz.
So, I think one of the reasons why we have such a trend is due to our monetary system (like in the real world, the price of gold to dollar has an upward trend). there is little we can do to change this drastically, but as gold is not always going up, we also should be able to revers trens, and what is more I believe we should try as hard as we can to do it. Especially that the price of our competition: steem is not drooping down so fast, and in fact we now have nearly the same prices, when one year ago steem was far away from us. Most important is the value of the blockchain and community itself, but also high inflation is not helping us, and I think we can see this now, when our prices are dropping faster, then steem does.
As a common folks of this community, we can't do much with this problem. Witnesses can, and they already dropped the APR of staked HBD to 15% from 20%. It was the first, most obvious and fastest step to fight the problem we have (high inflation, and risk of getting into a spiral). They probably can do more, but lets leave it for now and let's focus on what WE can do. There is one rather easu thing we can do to help ourselves and the whole blockchain to break inflation, and raise the price of Hive. It is sending tokens to @null and burning them.
Well, let's be honest. No one will willingly give up their hard-earned coins for such an uncertain purpose (we can't be sure if our efforts will change a thing). But there is more... pleseure way to do this, then throw away what we earned.
It is really simple: someone (or a lot of ppl) needs to add as a beneficiary to his post(s) @null account, and then a lot of people should vote for it. Voters don't lose anything besides the chance to support something else, Writers will lose potential income. But if we succeed here, everyone will benefit greatly! So it is worth trying!
And here is where my project starts. First of all, I will be publishing daily posts here with 95% burning. Posts will be mostly simple statistics about how much our community burned tokens this way, and with leaderboards to encourage more ppl to make posts with burning some of the tokens. Maybe in the future if the community will take part in great numbers in this little competition we will together expand to find more ways of helping Hive.
If everything will go smoothly I will start daily posts from 01.09, and I hope for positive vibes from the community.
Let's Make Hive Valuable Again together!
PS. Before my little project has started, we have already top ranked burning post author: @buildawhale Thank you for your post
