There are a couple of "Hive movies" coming out. They both sound great. One is being regarding as the "Hive film" (see @filmmaking4hive) and one as a documentary called "FreeChain" (see @freechain). I'm looking forward to both.
I figured, "Why not make an animated version?" So, I made this video in my low-quality animation style.
The Hive Story Animation
[Edit: added link to "Conditions"]
Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steemit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(cryptocurrency)
Decrypt article: https://decrypt.co/38050/steem-steemit-tron-justin-sun-cryptocurrency-war
Conditions: https://hiveblocks.com/tx/546471d9d0eafc22a1291a8c92cf4f1ac00d610e
Daisy: http://fromtexttospeech.com
Transcript
The Hive Story Animation
This is the Hive story. Animated version. By @crrdlx.
To look at Hive, we have to start at the beginning. And understand, cryptocurrency is still very new. Let’s go back, real quick. In the very beginning was Bitcoin and Satoshi Nakamoto, of course. Then, a few other blockchains spun off from Bitcoin, Dogecoin for instance. Then, smart contract chains started popping up, like Ethereum in 2013. And, we go from there.
But, this is the Hive story. So, to start at the beginning of the Hive story, we start with BitShares. Dan Larimer made BitShares and launched it in the summer of 2014, really, really early in crypto. It was clunky-looking and not so user friendly, at least by today’s standards. But, it was great in that it worked. And, a couple of things were pretty revolutionary. First, you could send funds to a username, something you could read and remember, not a long string of letters and numbers like Bitcoin or Doge or Ethereum. And, secondly, Dan moved away from Proof of Work (like Bitcoin) or Proof of Stake (POS, like Ethereum) and he came up with Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS)...and that’s what Hive uses today.
And then, Dan moved on to a new blockchain project called Steemit. We’ll get right back to this in a moment.
But, after he was done with Steemit, Dan Larimer later moved on again to make EOS. Dan’s very makey makey. He’s makey-makey, not so much stick-aroundy. But, let’s just be thankful for and respect the making! Innovators gonna innovate! Anyway, EOS isn’t really part of the Hive story. So, let’s jump right back to Steemit.
Steemit was new and it was great. It was to be social media mixed in with cryptocurrency. Doing your social media meant earning crypto. Instead of the social media platform earning from your efforts, you would earn. That’s a really good concept.
Online, steemit.com was the place to be. At first, it was the wild wild west. There were crazy rewards. Then, it kind of cooled off. It was a great platform with lots of daily users, maybe more than any other chain, thanks largely to the Steem Monsters NFT game. And yet, with the crypto space having boomed into the huge mega-space that it is today, Steemit kind of grew into just being there, doing what it was doing, hanging out, just one of many chains.
And then, around late 2019 and early 2020, just as COVID-19 was dropping, a fellow named Justin Sun came into the picture. And this is where the story gets interesting. This is where it gets crazy. And this is what has come to define Hive as what it is. A huge battle went down. This is an epic story in the cryptocurrency space. It will become legendary.
Okay, before jumping into what Justin did, it’s necessary to back up just a bit to the start of Steemit. Understand, the main source for this narrative is an article on decrypt.co, it’s amazing and I can’t improve on it, so take a look for yourself at: https://decrypt.co/38050/steem-steemit-tron-justin-sun-cryptocurrency-war. I’m only trying to shorten things up here, and animate it, but...here it is:
Go back to 2016. The devs who were building Steemit were planning a launch real soon, then they suddenly noticed that the blockchain was already live! Dan Larimer and the Steemit Inc. CEO Ned Scott had jumped the gun, they’d launched the mainnet, and they were already mining the STEEM coin. They evidently mined 80% of the tokens in what was called the “ninjamine”...cool name, but sneaky sneaky.
So much for a quote “fair mine”, where the launch date is announced, carried out, and anyone can try to mine on an equal and level playing field. Nevertheless, Steemit started and it grew and it gained users. Post, comment, upvote, get upvotes, earn STEEM, earn money. All the legacy platforms rewarded in “likes” or “friends” or whatever platform points they gave, and the platform benefited from user’s efforts and posts. However, Steemit rewarded, not in digital likes, but in real money straight to the actual users themselves!
Back to Justin Sun. Justin started Tron in 2017 or 18ish, a year or two after Steemit. Tron is yet another blockchain and Tron was just kind of...there. Justin wanted more users for his chain, because, it was, just kind of...there. Steemit had users. Every single day. It had users. So, he decided to buy up enough stake of STEEM to take over Steemit. This was just like one company or billionaire buying up shares of stock of a corporation in a “hostile takeover”...whether you like it or not, the other company or person can simply buy up enough to take over and control. That’s why it’s called a “hostile” takeover.
Justin starts buying.
Dan Larimer had moved on by this time. What happened is that Ned Scott sold his ninjamined shares to Justin Sun for 8 million dollars, and Justin was an instant Steemit mega-whale. Remember, with POS or with DPOS, those with the stake hold the power.
It gets a little techy here, but with Steemit, the top 20 so-called “witnesses” make the blocks in the blockchain. That is, they run the chain. Those in the top 20 must get voted in by other users/stakeholders. So, Justin started voting up and getting witnesses that were on his team, Team Justin, so to speak.
The community wasn’t having any of this. The Steemit community felt this was clearly a way for Justin Sun to buy Steemit users and melt them over into the Tron chain. So…
Some Steemit devs got together and did an upgrade to the blockchain. The thing about blockchains, the good ones, the public ones, is that they are open for everyone to see. The code is there. The devs secretly changed the code so that it now excluded Justin Sun and the witnesses on his team. Justin be like: “Wait what?! I’m shut out? I just paid $8 million! AHHH!”
Justin acted civilly and professionally on chain at first, something like, “Let’s get on a conference call and work this out, yes?” But, he also starts talking to exchanges. The exchanges had lots of STEEM which meant lots of voting or witness power. If he got them on Team Justin, he could take back control of the blockchain. It gets real techy here, but there’s a 13 week delay on this business. So, Justin changed the rules on the 13 week rule to get back full power right now! Sneaky sneaky.
At this point, the cat was out of the bag, it was outright war. Justin was calling the devs “hackers” now and it was on like Donkey Kong. Now, the Steemit devs who had secretly locked out Justin Sun found themselves locked out. Are you following this ping pong action?!
The movers and shakers and whales in the Steemit community got together and started to a voting war. The goal was to try to get enough of the 20 witnesses to take back the chain. Justin started getting nervous. He put out a statement saying he’d give back some power, but he listed a handful of conditions. It’s a little hard to find now, but thanks to the immutability of blockchain, it’s still out there at this link on hiveblocks.com: https://hiveblocks.com/tx/546471d9d0eafc22a1291a8c92cf4f1ac00d610e
Justin’s 11th and last condition has become the classic Justin Sun condition: Do you like Justin Sun or you just want to [---bleep---] him? It wasn’t even a condition, it was just an expletive question thrown in for good measure. If the cat still wasn’t out of the bag yet, the cat was out now.
Justin still had the upper hand at this point. But then, Binance announced it would start powering down its STEEM tokens. This meant that, over 13 weeks, Justin’s power would slowly diminish. The battle for the 20 witness voters see-sawed back and forth. It was a tug-of-war. Then, Justin got a bunch of STEEM from Binance and used it to up his power...and it looked like Justin might stay in control after all.
And then…
The other thing about blockchains, along with them being open and public, is that they can be forked.
Again, the devs got together in secret. This time, they didn’t do a quote, “upgrade” to the Steemit chain, this time, they forked the chain entirely to make a whole new blockchain.
The new chain was to be called “Hive” – not sure who named it – but it was a mirror image of Steemit without a couple of things. The ninjamined tokens were out. Steemit.com the company was out. Justin Sun was out. The pro Justin Sun witnesses of Team Justin were out. Everything else was the same. All user posts and comments cryptocurrencies and everything was just mirrored over. Everything. It was simply starting over with a clean slate and doing it right this time.
Hive went live March 20, 2020. That’s 3/20/2020,
or three 20’s get it? Anyway…
The pro Justin Sun folks were not happy. They argued that they’d bought or acquired STEEM tokens fairly and squarely and now the rug was being pulled out from underneath them.
The Hive folks said, “Hey, this is blockchain, this is open source, things can be forked, and when a fork is made the forkers can make their own rules. These are our rules. You can have your Steemit chain. Do as you please. Have fun.”
Quickly, nearly everyone on the old Steemit chain moved over to the Hive chain.
A new blockchain started and it worked great.
A new website started and Hive.io became the go-to website.
A new logo emerged thanks to Hive user @roelandp.
New front ends emerged.
New dapps emerged.
Justin Sun and Steemit were locked out by the leaders of Hive. Justin said Hive stole from him. So, now he would lock out Hivers from Steemit. The irony is...it was those exact Hivers who’d help lead the way to make Steemit so lucrative for Justin to get into in the first place! But now, he’d locked them out anyway.
The Hivers who were locked out by Justin weren’t happy...and this is understandable because they’d just lost a lot of money. All of the fruits of their hard labor had been ripped out from underneath them. Still, what’s the saying from “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”? Something like, “Two tears in a bucket…” I forget the rest, but I think it was, “Two tears in a bucket...just forget about it.”
Although it stung, the leaders, and Hive, moved on. The community just pulled up the tent stakes and moved on. Team Justin was standing in the middle of an empty field, saying, “What…?”
And that’s it.
This story about the fork of Hive has all the drama in it that you’d want in a Hollywood movie. But, the fork really just all fluff and Hollywood tinsel-town glitz. Here’s the real lesson about Hive.
Decentralized blockchains are about a lot of things. Things like immutability, transparency, censorship-resistance, etc., but, one lesson that Steemit learned the hard way is that people matter. The community matters. The people on the chain fuel the chain. This is especially true for a blockchain like Steemit, ahem Hive, where social media and tech and finance are intermingled. The community is what makes up that blockchain. In the case of Steemit, the people just voted with their feet and walked away.
So, where are we now?
Hive is doing just fine. And looking back, the fork just might have been one of the best things to ever happen to the chain. It energized the community. It gave the community focus and purpose.
And, Hive just never looked back.
Here’s what Hive is all about…
1. YOU owning your account (you can’t be deplatformed because somebody doesn’t like you)
2. YOU own your content (not the platform you posted it on)
3. YOU earning rewards from your account (not the platform you posted it on)
4. YOU doing what you want (there’s no CEO or corporation that tells you what you can or cannot do)
A current buzzword is Web3 or Web 3.0. It may be a buzzword, but it’s an important word. What’s Web3? Well, Web 1 was simply reading pages on the internet or emails. It was just reading content. Web 2 was interacting with content, like with Wikipedia, or MySpace, or Facebook, or Twitter. Interaction was good, and the next level, but they all were, and still are, all run by centralized something-or-others, usually a corporation. Web 3 is decentralized. No one person or no one company is in control. It exists on a blockchain, not a company server. And, YOU are in control. That’s the difference with Web3. The users own and run it themselves. Hive is Web3.
There’s lots of talk now about building Web3. It’s often talked about by companies throwing out the buzzword. They say they are building Web3,. But, Web3 is already here! It’s on Hive!
Hive is Web3.
Maybe you ask, “What’s this Hive blockchain all about? What’s it mean to me.” There’s a lot to do on Hive. A lot for you to do. For instance…
• Bloggers can blog. You post, you comment, you create videos. Whatever you want. But, you own your content. You earn from your content. You’re not censored. You can’t be kicked off the platform.
• Gamers can game. Ever heard of Splinterlands? Might be the most-used NFT game on the internet. That’s Hive. Like play-to-earn games, got those too.
• Techies can tech. If you’re into the technology of blockchains, Hive is a deep and rich platform to build on.
• Hive has NFTs, that’s art NFTs or game NFTs. You can create, buy/sell or hodl, or whatever.
• Like trading and making money? Hive and its sidechains have that too with multiple exchanges and communities.
• Basically, anything blockchain is on Hive.
Mostly, people can join in with Hive on whatever level they’re on. If you just want to read other people’s posts, you can do that. If you want to interact with an upvote, you can do that. Want to comment, you can do that. If you want to buy and sell crypto tokens, you can do that. If you want to build a bot, you can do that. If you want to build a game, you can do that. If you want to run a witness, you can do that.
Really, you can do anything you want with Hive. Freedom.
Freedom from being shut down.
Freedom from control by others.
Freedom to earn from your work.
Freedom to express yourself.
Freedom to do what you wish.
You hear a lot about the fork with Hive. And, the fork is a major part of Hive. But, it’s not the only part. And, it’s not the most important part.
The Hive story is really about the people using the Hive blockchain. And mostly, it's about what you do with it.
Hive on.
Sign up with Hive. - https://signup.hive.io
Why join hive? - http://whyhive.co
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Not on Hive? The top benefits of the Hive blockchain: (1) no ONE person/group runs it, (2) YOU own and control your content, and (3) YOU earn the rewards that your content generates. Learn more or consider using my referral link to get your free account here and I'll support you as you begin. Alternately, you can see other options here.