Hive, much like many other cryptocurrencies, at its core, is people buying the currency and people selling it. On a day by day basis this determines its value, supply and demand. Now there's many factors involved of course, but I just wanted to bring this up for those who may have forgotten or are new to the ecosystem while I go on talking about providing value to the ecosystem. 

Let's look at buyers first, it could be many different ones with different plans and thoughts behind it. It could be short term buyers, those willing to place some value in the token on exchanges then quickly placing a sell order at a price higher than what they bought it for. They don't care about the token, what it does, what they can do with it, etc. They just want a certain profit out of it and they move on after that. Much of these could also be done by bots in many forms.

Then you have your medium to long term buyers, these could also be regular people or institutions, countries, what have you. As long as they have access to Binance and the plethora of currencies offered to be traded there, they may dip their toes in some Hive and want to keep it alongside others for a few months to a few years and maybe take some profit then.

Lastly, you have those who actually do research, check out the pages like hive.io, some of our front-ends, read up on FAQ, create an account, get involved, etc. This is a minority of people I reckon but they do exist and join every now and then. These are the ones who get the most out of Hive as it requires some knowledge to make the most out of it. That said, this minority may become even smaller considering the unstaking period and many not being okay with their value being locked up for 13 weeks, but that's the way it is for now.

Those who've done their research and are investing with long term in mind get the most benefits, they can stake their liquid Hive, earn 3.2% APR on HP and another 8.5% on average from curation or delegating their stake out to some projects. In a way you can also consider that those holding liquid Hive for longer periods are being diluted by those keeping it staked. If everyone had Hive staked there would be very little liquidity on the exchanges but close to no one would then be "losing out" on returns. This also means, since currently over half of all Hive in existence is liquid, that those staying staked are earning even more at these times than if there was more hive staked than liquid. This is because the inflation of Hive is constant but decreasing over time, this new Hive has "got to go out", whether it goes to you or me, that depends on curation, but if you're holding your Hive liquid, you don't get a say in it. If 75% was staked compared to current under 50%, you'd be earning less from APR and curation rewards and if it was 100% then you'd be earning half of what you earn now. This is why people often tell you that during these bear markets is the best time to be active and make the most of it, this and because there's usually less active authors and curators as well, although the latter not as much as the former. 

Now let's take a look at some of that activity.

There's a lot of different kinds of active users as well, some that are passive, they've invested or earned in the past and are now mainly earning curation rewards and HP APR or potentially also HBD APR. Then there's also those who have earned in the past, have invested and are also active posting. Add on other things, like having a witness, getting funded by the DHF, being involved in many dapps and earning various tokens, etc. If you've been very active on this chain for all its lifetime, you generally do really well when it comes to earnings, unless, well, you've never really provided much value or made any good connections.

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I was initially going to get through many different kind of Hive accounts here and their activity, but I think that would become a much longer post, maybe I'll save that for another time but I'm sure most of you reading this can imagine there's many different ways some people go about their earnings on Hive and what they choose or are forced to do with them for one reason or another. 

Let's instead start talking about the point I wanted to make with this post initially. Value. 

As you can imagine, those long term investors, either off-chain or on-chain, are one of the reasons Hive has value to begin with. It's one of the reasons posts have a $ value assigned to it and people can earn from such activity, if there were no investors, we'd all just be earning tokens worth close to nothing (look up blurt I guess to see what that's like). Those investors who are very active here are looking to distribute their inflation towards activities they deem worthy of rewards, they either entrust others to do the distributing for them or do it themselves. Obviously it's not always the case but I think most investors and regular users here would want the token to appreciate in value because that would open quite a lot of more doors for opportunity and growth and to put the chain to test in regards to scalability. 

I personally curate my feed quite often, I follow some accounts (when I remember) based off of reblogs or other curators but one thing I put a lot of importance on is their activity. They've got to be active on chain socially. The thought process behind this is that most users who are here aren't some bigshot influencers or investors with a lot of connections outside of the ecosystem. At the same time very few of them are providing content that's so valuable in and of itself that it's driving a lot of traffic from within and outside towards their posts. I made a post some time ago asking that if there was a subscription method on Hive where you'd have to subscribe to certain authors to be able to consume their content and if they would pay for it, very few said they would and very few of them could name any authors that came to mind. While this is normal at this size of the platform and this amount of "revenue" through inflation, it also proves my point that most of the content here in and of itself isn't that valuable. 

I have of course tried my best to give everyone an opportunity to bring more value to their content through things like Proof of Sharing, even though that got nipped in the bud by Twitter for now. The issue I have with some users is that they think they can just be content with posting and earning rewards without a care in the world if anyone is consuming it or if their presence is bringing any value to the platform. Value and posts and everything is very objective of course, I'm not going to debate that, but at the current stage there's not that much of a difference between one post or another. Based on genre's, originality, the author, there's a lot of factors there too, but let's for instance take this post by myself as an example. 

Someone who's been around quite a bit on Hive could've easily written a similar post themselves. This user, same as me, would also not have any outside influence, i.e. being able to direct traffic or share this post somewhere where they could bring a lot of readers to it who may not have a Hive account yet or be aware of the platform. Similarly let's also assume that other than posting, this user doesn't do anything else on and around Hive. Posting is all there is for both of us, without even getting into rewards, long term viewpoint with their stake, curation, etc. 

Now let's say this user is very active with responding to comments left on his post, he replies to most of them, maybe upvotes a few without responding. It generates a lot of discussions back and forth and his average comments per post equals about 20. Me on the other hand haven't responded to a comment in months, don't even curate any of them, the only thing I do is just post day in and out and earn some rewards based on my consistency with posting. 

The question now is, if the content is of similar quality, similar genre and similar rewards earned, which one of these users would you downvote if you _had_ to downvote one of them? 

Now of course downvotes may not be the best example here, many choose not to participate in it at all and most of the time I can't blame them as it's quite a headache. A better question is probably, who would you support with your votes if you had to choose either or, or if you'd vote one of them higher than the other. 

Here as well there's a lot of factors involved, you may know one of them personally, you may have a history with one of them, etc, then there may also be some backroom handshakes and deals between curator and author we may not know about. Then there could also be difference of comments, maybe one of them is just posting "good post" over and over or "thanks" as a reply to comments and that's all they do while the other has a lot more effort behind his. 

My main point for this example is that, since most of us here today don't have an influence outside of the ecosystem and at the same time aren't such well established or sought after authors where people are on their edge of the seat waiting for new content from us, we may want to reward those more who at least keep attention from within on their posts and build longlasting connections with others that make the platform a better place to be for everyone involved. 

From the viewpoint of investors, I think I'd speak for many of them when I say that I'm sure they'd want to reward those where effort and longterm connections are being built rather than those who may not care too much about the "community" and accept rewards on whatever. It's also a lot easier to sell rewards if you've spent close to no effort/time gaining them than it is for those who've put in some sweat to get to where they are today, but even so that shouldn't mean the battle is over and that you can now enjoy rewards forever no matter your continued effort and potential consumption from at least within the ecosystem. 

This is how we "mine" Hive after all, compared to Bitcoin Miners where they have machines guess their way to solutions, we're using brainpower to earn some rewards instead, hence proof of brain. 

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I may get into more ways people can get involved and "bring" value to the ecosystem other than just being an author and doing common sense things like not taking this place for granted. I think for now this post was long enough though but may be a good intro to what value I think we ought to focus on and why I'd hope more curators, especially those casting votes manually, should look at more factors than just post content when curating. Curation helps us see more of the things we want to see, so as long as you're doing it manually and not auto without overview, you could put a little more effort behind the votes to check on the history of the accounts you're voting on. 

Anyway, just some thoughts and something we've been striving to improve and keep on improving with our curation. Thanks for reading and as always feel free to leave your thoughts on it in the comment section! 

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