Going through some of these tweets by Chief of the SEC's Office of Internet Enforcement and comparing them to Hive

Before I begin I have to make clear that 1. I'm a Finnish guy who studied IT for a bit, German in University after graduating from college, anything I may know from American Laws, technology in blockchain and banking systems, etc, comes from reading/hobby on the side's often times at random and may or may not be correct and very limited of the way I view/understand things. Please keep that in mind while I go through some of these points/tweets when comparing them to the tech we have here, even that not fully grasped as I can't view/read it from a coder/developer's PoV so I'll be speaking purely from a "regular" user who spends way too much time and is still curious enough to figure out how everything works even if I don't understand how exactly.

Banner Source: pixabay, keyword: economy

The twitter thread, he also shares some sources to articles. Will just be quoting his tweets.

Crypto is a revolutionary equalizer for the unbanked and will heal historical injustices of financial exclusion.
False.
Crypto's just another example of “Predatory Inclusion” and affinity fraud, orchestrated to dupe the poor, disadvantaged and disaffected.

Okay so let's start with his first one, this should be simple enough to refute about Hive.
Basically Hive is borderless, anyone and everyone can access it by default (unless governments/ISP providers censor certain Hive front-ends such as hive.blog or @peakd) even with TOR you should be able to access these front-ends to 1. Generate an account, often (and for now) for free through portals like https://signup.hive.io/ that lead to @ecency or @hiveonboard for free accounts which at max require an email or SMS to verify uniqueness to receive an account, things that pretty much anyone has access to cheaply/easily (but not everyone). Even if you pay to ensure you get an account the cost is often very low, blockchain cost being 3 hive which at the highest has been $6-7 and at the lowest $0.30, currently resting at $1.20. Meaning anyone from anywhere, no matter country, race, religion or affinity can get access to our front-ends and/or blockchain and use it as they see fit without anyone ever being able to block, censor or get in the way of it in the centralized ways we're used to that are becoming more and more regular day by day.

You could ask any Hive user if any poor, disadvantaged or disaffected users have been "duped" by as a default using the blockchain. I can assure you, depending on what some people translate the word duped to be (it's not a get rich quick/"make money from home"), that none of those demographics have suffered from having used Hive in a monetary kind of sense. Data also tells us that a majority of Hive users don't buy Hive, they don't rent equipment to mine Hive, they don't invest in equipment to do so neither, or pay extra electricity costs like certain chains to provide nonsense mathematical equations in order to "secure" the network in exchange for some Hive rewards. A small % of users does that but only a small % of stake goes towards them.

At its heart, crypto is a uniquely innovative way to restore freedom and liberty to individuals. False.
Unable to displace legitimate currencies, crypto is a perilous, vacuous asset lacking basic/critical/traditional guardrails, oversight and protections.

Alright so a few things here. Hive isn't looking to displace legitimate currencies or other cryptocurrencies for that matter, Hive the token works as a form of stake in the network that can be liquified to be used as a trading currency. In this early stage of crypto and the vast majority of them, many with great uncertainty, risk and short term sights of traders in existence it's only natural to understand why many prefer the liquid asset of it rather than the staked one. Especially so many who never even bother checking what it is exactly they are buying, what you can do with it in its other form, the advantages and influence/attention it gives you and last but not least the economic incentive to earn more stake by having and staying staked up.

What he says about guardrails and protection is true in a way, there's no insurances, trust in government/banks that they will hold your crypto safe for you and if things would go sideways you could look for the law to get what belongs to you back through bailouts, etc. Not going to get too deep into that but what crypto lacks in the traditional form of security, it makes up for it in personal security as long as you take good precautions and steps to ensure that security yourself. Doing so not only keeps the crypto safe but it also ensures that nobody else has any say on what you do with it or risk of losing it due to other parties misfortunes.

Compared to other crypto, Hive takes some extra steps to keep your crypto safe, aside from stake taking up to 3 months to be unstaked and "stolen" in weekly installments, you can also store liquid Hive and Hive backed Dollars in your savings account that has another barrier of 3 days withdrawal time. This of course all makes sense due to the way account recovery works which close to no other crypto use, a form of recovering your keys if a bad actor has stolen them from you and you still have the old keys and a way to prove to your recovery account that you're the real owner within 30 days of the keys having been changed. This extra option existing gives you extra protection whereas other crypto you'd lose everything in the same second your keys are leaked as we've seen stories on Twitter happening to Ethereum users losing out their coins and all assets in a blink of an eye when installing malware/spyware, being swindled/duped into allowing access to their keys to others, etc.

Crypto offers an amazing opportunity to benefit from decentralization. False.
Wealth and power in DeFi are more concentrated than in traditional finance, and this centralization creates conflicts of interest and affords huge opportunities for exploitation.

I can't speak for all of DeFi, but I can't say that this is true compared to Traditional Finance. Traditional Finance, the way I see it, primarily and often times only benefit the already rich, "licensed" investors and VC's who get in early into seed funding and further funding rounds. If you as a regular person wanted to invest in a new start-up you'd have a very hard time doing so in the traditional markets from what I understand, unless there's some group-funding platforms to do so I may not have heard of that would still split responsibility and trust onto others to not stiff you later on on your shares. While I don't disagree that the rich often get richer in DeFi, it does give single individuals the opportunity to get in with any amount most often at any time, if those times are later than others and if the shares aren't fair, that's on you and the project to determine if it's worth the risk and those risks exist in TradFi as well where founders and companies are known to get most of the equity. Similar to holding crypto, here risk and scams are also greater, in exchange you see those tokens that are legit/show promise perform quite well during uptrends allowing for small investments to become quite large while the odds of them being the one dwindling as the space is ripe with grifters and con artists copying projects, setting roadmaps/milestones while always looking to just make the most of it before implosion/rug pulls occur, but this is often times not limited to DeFi neither.

Blockchain is a once-in-a-lifetime game changer. False.
A mere record on a glorified, limited-writer, append-only database linked to the solution of a meaningless math problem is not a financial and societal panacea. It's mathematical computative blather.

I don't think he's done enough research on this one, the innovation that Satoshi pushed forward starting with PoW is not nothing. A way for decentralized tech to trustlessly maintain security through incentives in a way that didn't exist before is not nothing. The tech has evolved and been reshaped many times, everyone trying how it can be best used for certain things to maintain the balance between security, scalability and decentralization is a literal billion dollar industry. Most of the people involved early on saw this innovation as something real and legitimate which helped build a lot of value on top of it to give people freedom from centralized points of failure.

Crypto works brilliantly as a currency. False.
Crypto's fails as a "currency" b/c the price is too volatile; fees too high; taxes too burdensome; and risks too infinite. How can anyone accept crypto as payment when it could be worth less the very next day?

Now here I can't really blame him as this is true for most crypto, while I thought markets would stabilize a bit after the last bull run it turns out things just got more hectic but as it turns out it wasn't much different from traditional stocks either with all the uncertainty of the economy in general lately. You know where I'm going to go with this regarding hive; hive backed dollars. I also think that aside from having that choice of an algorithmic stable coin next to the main asset, I believe that with the efforts we've put in place on ensuring stabilization for HBD, it over time increasing in supply and usecases it might even make Hive more stable if that's the currency you prefer considering the upside potential. Either way, one can simply choose either or on Hive and easily and without fees trade between the two and hopefully in the future more merchants, exchanges and other outlets were to use HBD as a form of payment considering its no-fee nature and quick transaction time and irreversibility.

Crypto works brilliantly as an investment. False.
Crypto's fails as an "investment" b/c there's no regulatory oversight/transparency/consumer protections/insurance/licensure/net capital requirements and is rife w/ market manipulation/insider trading/fraud.

Now Hive may be unique here as well but if I had to look at the chart I'd say that in terms of investors it's not like Hive has been above what it is now for that many days compared to what it's been under, what I mean by this is that the odds of when people bought in was higher during the lows generally looking at the timeline that most should not be "under" much. If you look at it in terms of other crypto currencies or if you just held Hive liquid on exchanges then it might not look as good of an investment, but you know the saying, do your research, especially on the tokens you invest in.

In terms of users, I think Hive is positioned to be one of the very, very few where sweat equity results in an investment and I believe a majority of them have a pretty decent ROI having started with 0 or close to 0 capital investment. This of course comes at a cost towards the other regular investors but considering the way Hive works I think it's something presumed by many at this point in time and they consider it to be something long term rather than expecting profit as quick as some other coins out there. I'll talk a bit more about this on my ending note.

Investing in crypto is a brilliant inflation hedge. False.
"Inflation Hedge" is a bogus marketing slogan. The value of the crypto market has plummeted alongside rapidly rising inflation. For instance, bitcoin has lost half of its value since January, 2022.

This one is just dumb in my opinion, anyone who compares the highs to what the price is now and uses it to refute things is just trying to paint a shitty picture right off the gate. Especially since he compares it to inflation which has been occurring for literally decades and the $ has lost purchasing power up to almost 100x last I checked in the last century. It's not a great comparison due to Bitcoin & crypto being so young but in general something that went from close to worthless and maybe 10 cents a coin on the first exchanges to $65k at the highest doesn't really need to prove much against "inflation".

Crypto is a brilliant store of value. False.
Crypto fails as a store of value b/c it lacks utility and intrinsic benefit, a measure of what an asset is actually worth. It has no value to store and its price is solely dependent upon the greater-fool-theory.

For most tokens this may be true but Bitcoin is a good comparison to Gold which both have good usecases and both have scarcity, although only one of them proven to be limited over the next hundreds if not thousands of years. Saying crypto lacks utility is normal for someone who's probably just looked at Bitcoin and a few other top coins, but what that has to do with proof of storage is a bit beyond me. What an asset is worth is up to the people, this guy should know that, there's dumb things that are worth unimaginable amounts of money if you looked at their market caps compared to their supply, things like certain dolls, collectible's items such as physical cards, toys, etc. The market decides that and the market alone, not the SEC.

Given its immutable/permanent blockchain record, crypto-using criminals are easier to catch. False.
The stark truth is that given crypto's pseudonymity, it's an ideal tool for criminals who will rarely get caught & whose pillages will rarely be recovered.

Seems like his arguments are getting weaker over time. This is an issue I admit, an issue that still occurs mostly with fiat and digital fiat but an issue that can happen with crypto nonetheless. It is unavoidable in my opinion. You're kind of trying to beat math when math is what shapes everything. There's never gonna not be washing services, shady exchanges that'll handle your money/crypto without asking many questions, who knows, bad actors may even start accepting crypto directly at some point. While most exchanges have faltered to the governments and authorities requests for KYC and anti money laundering there will still always be ways to overcome that but that doesn't mean it can't be made harder for the bad actors. I'm not too familiar on analytical data tools or services that look at these things but if the implosion of FTX taught us anything is that people are pretty good at tracking what's being done with the money in a sense that they can follow it but are unsure of to who's wallet or where it's currently residing in. In general though it's not really a strong argument against crypto because these issues mostly plague fiat to this day even with the general popularity of crypto.

Bitcoin is wholly different from crypto. False.
Like all crypto, bitcoin isn't decentralized. Miners form mining pools and wealth is hugely concentrated. Bitcoin maximalists separate bitcoin from the rest of crypto to create the bogus illusion of scarcity.

Here's he's not actually fully wrong. :D I dare have him test to un-decentralize Hive, though.

Anyway, think I'll stop quoting and comparing his tweets here, even though not all of them directly apply to Hive as Hive is quite unique to the rest I figure it's probably a good point to say a few words about my thoughts on Hive.

The attention economy was used for a brief moment in Hive's long history but since there's barely any users to request the attention of other consumers it hasn't really been battle-tested properly, though I do see small fractions of it from time to time. Brave kind of snuck in and stole that slogan I guess as well although it has nothing to do with the way attention was meant to be gained/bought here.

Hive is in my opinion, firstmost a social media platform as it allows users to do a lot of things surrounding "content", whether that is in the form of text-based posts like this, or comments or transactions such as custom json's or notifications such as podping, and who knows what else may come in the future. It allows for a wide variety of things to be immutable and uncensorable, these are the things that then apps and platforms use to make their things work and the advantage they bring compared to their web2 counterpart which most have one of. Due to it allowing many things to use the networks and technologies immutability through decentralization it means that dapps of all kinds and diversities can co-exist and make the most out of Hive, it is only strengthened by the way inflation works through the reward pool and the diverse and borderless users who become stakeholders to direct it in their own "community consensus".

No one who joins Hive is forced to "pay up" to be part of the network, to store their text-content on chain immutably and indefinitely. Same can't be said for Ethereum and Bitcoin, there is no way to directly earn it from the blockchain alone in the form you do it here, with your attention and human skills. No one is forced to invest to reap the rewards but nothing in life is free. I've seen plenty of users over the past 6+ years come with nothing and end up with a small fortune, some leave, some stay, some think they're tricking the community and investors to profit off of them to then leave and never look back, some lose some profit to help/assist others in the community. It's all a give and take sort of community with the consensus enforcing it where lines are some times cross but tools exist to incentivize it from not occurring. While there may be con artists on Hive as well, which can't be helped given its borderless and censorship resistant nature, there are incentives in place that if you look towards long term, earn/grow your stake in a meaningful/community accepted way you may continue to be rewarded all the way down the road. The longer you stay and stay a good actor, the higher the odds of reaping the rewards you may have sought for, or gain attention, a following, friendships, engagement, entertainment, all of the things that revolve around being social. There's plenty of stakeholders who don't expect any rewards using Hive and still getting rewards, while at the same time there's those who expect rewards and don't get them, often followed by leaving the network thinking their time is better spent elsewhere and there's nothing wrong with that. This early in Hive's age you can't please everyone and you can't keep everyone here, with or without rewards.

Investor's of hive have often been against the way inflation works on Hive, seeing their value being dwindled going to those who some times work towards it some times not (curation/autovotes/questionable votes) some times bring value to the platform, some times don't (authors, influencers, long term stakeholders who've earned it becoming curators) some times use their stake for good and some times not. Then we also have investors who don't even care about Hive anymore as they look into layer 2's instead, gaming, socials, video, etc, and just use the base layer as a middleman to get from one currency to Hive's 2nd layer currencies.

One thing we don't see much of, but I think it will change in the future when there's more users/attention for people to want to have, is wanting the influence not just to earn post rewards and sit on trending for the sake of the rewards, but stake to promote your brand/persona, stake to lease/buy to promote your company/product, stake to reward and grow your community around your product/service. There's still quite low demand on that, no matter what stats on platforms like dlease may want to trick you into believing. It exists and is awaiting demand, though, and if we have the users it will come.

Anyway, this post got a bit long and I may have lost track of a few train of thoughts along the way so apologize if it was a bit confusing or difficult to follow along, but I'd appreciate your input and if you've read it through the comments and curation of them. I hope the world will finally give Hive the attention it deserves considering how unique and different it is from everything else out there alone, rather than just what it can and would enable for humanity as a whole once it gets to become a house-hold name.

---

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta