The beginning of something big
Bitcoin broke the ground on something essential: a powerful support to a crumbling Western civilization. In time, it might prove to have been just a temporary crutch before the ineluctable fall. Or it might turn out to have been the innovation that saved us from sliding into chaos and war.
Is Bitcoin the biggest innovation since the Internet? The jury is still out. The question has been asked to several prominent people from the Hive community in the "Freechain" documentary.
Bitcoin has been the expression of a revolt. A revolt against the corruption and impunity of our financial and political elites that has been so apparent in the build-up and unfolding of the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. It is a "techno-solution" proposing an alternative power structure, designed not as a tree-like hierarchy, but rather as a mesh.
Alas, the unavoidable draw toward higher efficiency generates strong centralizing forces that are hard, and require constant effort to resist. While Bitcoin itself has become centralized at many levels, innovation has not stopped. A flurry of other "crypto currencies", based on the blockchain technology and selecting certain features of Bitcoin but not others have seen the light. Most of them turned out to be mediocre ideas or outright scams. This is why most Bitcoiners tend to dismiss the whole lot : "Bitcoin, not crypto".
But to anyone who accepts to look at reality, Bitcoin cannot be all things to all men. Because it was challenging the incumbent power structures, it had to be built in a defensive way, to be "censorship resistant". Satoshi remained anonymous, and the system allows anyone to join in almost anonymous manner and get rewarded with no gatekeeper having a say. Because it was the first, it had to gain trust, so its code was open to anyone's inspection, Satoshi withdrew early on and never touched the Bitcoin it had mined at the beginning of the system, and it's been designed with a fixed cap: 21 000 000. And because it needs to keep trust, to be predictable, it is almost impossible to change.
Earn
The natural consequences of all these necessary design choices were that Bitcoin turned out quickly to be almost impossible to fulfill the vision of a "democratic currency" that everyone can earn by mining with their desktop computers as Satoshi and Hal Finney and Ray Dillinger and Laszlo Haniecz, and all the first pioneers had done. Bitcoin production has quickly become concentrated in the hands of a new, alternative hierarchy. The "plebs" will still need to toil in their often meaningless jobs in order to earn fiat money, for which they now at least have a choice. For the first time in the past half century, people are given the choice of two types of money - the "credit money" of Central Banks and the "commodity money" represented by Bitcoin.
Spend
However "money" means more than "store of value", it should also be a good "medium of exchange". Bitcoin performs quite weakly as the latter, in spite of the efforts of the Lightning network developers. The main reasons are the deflationary design and the difficulty of earning Bitcoin. We saw above that Bitcoin is even harder to obtain than fiat currencies. The latter arrive automatically in your bank account as "your salary" at the end of the month (or the week, etc.). But if you want Bitcoin you need to make some additional steps, to go through additional hoops to convert a percentage of that fiat into it. Once you did that, the question looms large: why spend now when the price of everything else is heading to zero when expressed in Bitcoin? It is only logical to save in Bitcoin and keep the rest in fiat so that you spend the bad money and store the good.
Hive is a diamond in the rough
... an unpolished gem. "Freechain", the movie rightly focuses on Bitcoin at the beginning, "pays homage" briefly to Ethereum by displaying its logo for one split second, and then moves to Hive.
Most cryptocurrencies follow a similar script, and offer the prospective holders a similar promise: "buy using fiat and hold, and you'll be able to exchange your bags for more fiat at a later point in time. This is a huge intellectual betrayal of the Bitcoin's standard. Such cryptocurrencies are "wolfs (fiat) in sheep (blockchain) clothing".
Hive is different. You can earn Hive without spending fiat, with zero capital outlay, using your brain . And you can spend Hive quickly, with no fees. Hive is inflationary, not deflationary, hence there are no strong incentives to hold. As a matter of fact, Hive's price has been mostly flat over the years (unfortunately at a very low level). In this respect, this encourages spending. Even better, the Hive blockchain offers a decentralized dollar stablecoin, HBD, which increases acceptability as means of payment. I'll go out on a limb and posit that Hive is perhaps the only true, good cryptocurrency that complements Bitcoin and completes Satoshi's vision of a democratic currency that can support a parallel economy that works for the people.
