The economy is supposedly good.

Meanwhile, the stock market is regularly making new highs these days.

The crypto markets are not faring nearly as well.

I just checked the latest chart and on a year-to-year basis Bitcoin is down almost 30%. But that's small potatoes compared to our own Hive, which is down 78% on a year-to-year basis.

I used to make the tongue-in-cheek comment that whenever Bitcoin goes down 10% Hive goes down 20%, but when Bitcoin goes up 10% Hive only goes up 5%. Perhaps it's a bit of a Negative Nancy way of looking at life, but I'm not as far off the mark that's some might like to think.

In summary, at this point in time, I'm very happy to be part of this blogging community but I have reached the stage where I don't give a flying flip about the value of the Hive token. Doesn't mean I'm selling, just means I no longer care.

Frankly, I don't think it's ever going to go anywhere. Sure, it might make its way back up to 20 cents and come back down, but the whole idea that we're sitting on some kind of Golden Goose here is pretty much out the window.

Alas, that's not really Hive's fault. If anything, it's the fault of a world in which online content really has very little monetary value. Unless you're bringing millions of views, your opinions are pretty worthless.

In case you haven't been around that long, the original vision for the web was that it was to be a worldwide exchange of free information from peer to peer. The whole commercialization thing came much later. So, perhaps, we're just returning to the roots of where this whole gig began!

The problem humans invariably encounter is that as soon as money is involved in some situation people start Behaving Badly™. In essence, that means they fall straight into one of the biblical "seven deadly sins," namely greed.

And when you end up with the situation in which everybody thinks they're owed more than their fair share the system tends to get on thin ice very quickly!

While it might be a nice and idealistic thing to think that Hive is somehow a meritocracy, the whole proof-of-stake system essentially makes Hive more of an oligarchy than a meritocracy. Doesn't matter how good your content is unless you know the right people that isn't going to translate into much of anything.

But then again, much of what we see unfold around here is not Hive's problem, it's a global problem. Consider such a thing as the fairly well known Pareto Principle, which basically states that 80% of the results are created by 20% if the people, although it can be said of any kind of system whether it is financial or otherwise... and the 80/20 split is not necessarily a given either... it can be 95/5 or 90/10.

Much can be said about humans, but they are ultimately not an egalitarian species. Some would argue that they act according to "rational self-interest" but I would suggest that our self-interest isn't always rational and it's that assumption of rationality that often causes things to fall apart.

That probably holds true for virtually every economic theory. These theories work better in think tanks contained within Ivy covered Halls of Academia than they do out in a world where many people are lazy manipulative bullies who believe they're owed everything and some people are hard-working worker bees who end up with nothing because they get manipulated out of their fair share.

Not saying that as a wah-wah sob story but simply as a fact of how life tends to unfold because we all have different personalities and priorities.

Accordingly, life will always have users and usees.

In what do we trust? I'd suggest we trust in our ability to detect bullshit when we encounter it!

Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!

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