Rented Conviction

This is a term I heard a couple weeks back and it immediately struck a chord with me and everything I've been doing for the better part of the last decade. Most of us plebs in crypto have extreme levels of conviction. Many would call irresponsible, and it can come in many forms. In the 2020 DEFI/NFT shitcoin casino we called ourselves "apes". Other times we called ourselves degens or even mentally impaired. The result was the same: an undying conviction to stick around no matter how psychologically painful it might be to lose 90% or more of your net-worth.

Those who do not have the conviction to be here get washed out very quickly. We've all seen newbies buy the exact top and sell the exact bottom like they have some kind of psychic link with the market whispering the secrets of how to lose as much as possible. When times are tough people want to quit and when money is easy to come by everyone gets excited. It is what it is.

Is there a way around this?

On a very real level this is why most people and businesses crave stability above all else. It's hard to build on the open water when a random wave can wash away all you've accomplished in an instant. Many businesses operate on razor-thin profits and projections, sometimes for their entire existence. A 10% loss or gain at a critical time can make or break a company permanently.

So how do we make crypto more stable? Well first I think we have to focus on the types of work we can offer and what users can get paid to do. Unfortunately (or fortunately) Hive seems to be the only network who can pay their users to do anything, and right now the focus is on blogging, social media, video, and other forms of "quality content". On a very real level we need more jobs; hopefully ones that have more objective value and less subjective rewards. Easier said than done unfortunately or we'd already be sitting pretty in the top 10 on the market cap.

Working is a form of stability because even though the token value can flux wildly it's a lot better to get paid less for work than it is to see an investment deteriorate for months on end. Working doesn't come attached with certain psychological ailments like sunk-cost-fallacy where refusing to cut losses leads to even more loss. Someone can do the job or they can quit if the gig is no longer worth it for them. Of course that's not a great way to run a business (high employee turnover) but that's another matter entirely.

How can we make the Hive token more stable?

Strong liquidity pools to USD would help quite a bit. I often advocate for a massive HIVE/HBD AMM liquidity pool. Pretty convinced that would help quite a bit in terms of stabilizing the network by having a stronger link to our own 'debt'. Still waiting on the infra that makes this easier to accomplish like VSC and SPK network developments.

Another cliché that can stabilize any volatile asset is buying low and selling high. If everyone buys the lows: the lows are higher. If everyone sells the highs: the highs are lower. But what are we selling into? This is why I often advocate that The Swarm hold a lot of Bitcoin. Last cycle you could sell 1 Hive for 2000-5000 sats. Now 1 Hive is worth 300 sats... again. In the end Hive needs deep liquidity to both BTC and USD to succeed, in addition to more ways for users to generate "quality content" that exists outside of the social media box.

Circling back to Bitcoin & conviction

BTC is the best example when it comes to conviction because even though it is considered to be an extremely risk-on asset in the short/medium term it is undeniably risk-off when it comes to the four-year cycle. You can tell a newbie that all they need to do is hodl for 4 years and they'll make money, but they'll usually cash out at a huge loss anyway because they simply lack the conviction to be here. They rented their conviction from you when you convinced them to sign up. They did this during a bull rally when everything looked like it was going to be easy. A 30% dip later they are freaking out lamenting the huge "mistake" they just made. And yet it wasn't a mistake. They just need to STFU and do what you told them to do, but they can't because the conviction is not their own.

So why do we have conviction?

We have the needed conviction because we know that blockchain is the only option available to fix a lot of the world's economic problems. There is no other solution in sight. There are no alternatives. We know this because we've looked. We've done the work; we've studied for hundreds if not thousands of hours. We show up every day to learn something new or just dick around with the community or doomscroll on CT. Newbies don't have this. And when they do have it they have it during the good times and have yet to be absolutely gutted by a crippling bear market. The retention rate is unsurprisingly quite low.

Conclusion

Don't expect others to have the same conviction you have for this technology. Don't project your knowledge and experience with users that just got here this week/month/year/cycle. They don't know nothing, and they will continue to know nothing [on the average]. The average person in crypto is going to get a whole lot dumber before they get smarter. Welcome to mainstream adoption.