Hive Community Town Hall #1 - Governance | Recap and Transcription

Hive Community Town Hall

First Session - Governance

Speakers: 9

Alphabetical order: @anomadsoul, @arcange, @bookerman, @crimsonclad, @khaleelkazi, @l337m45732, @manuphotos, @taskmaster4450, @thelogicaldude.

Attendance: 837 listeners

Listen to the Community Town Hall #1 on X

We want to thank everyone who attended this first Hive Community Town Hall, either as a speaker or as a

Full Transcription

Introduction

@anomadsoul (moderator):This town hall is meant to encourage discussion, to provide guidance and to pretty much show newbies how Hive works and how they can get involved in everything related to Hive. Not only in creating content, but also in getting involved in governance, doing outreach on Web 2, how they can help Hive grow, and more.

This is just the first town hall of many to come.

Hopefully... With your attendance and your support, we can keep doing them. The point is not to centralize the conversation, but to have a space to give every Hiver the chance to speak, to listen to other people's opinions and discuss.

A few years ago, we used to have a town hall, but over the past two years there hasn't been a space like this one.

So, Taskmaster Jongolson, l337m45732 and anomadsoul decided to open up a space like this one, for all of the Hive community to join, gather, exchange takes, and pretty much be in the know about what's happening on Hive.

So Taskmaster, do you want to say a few words before we start with the space?

@taskmaster4450: I just want to add to it. The genesis of this idea stems from the fact that Hive is now at the point where it's traveling down many different routes. It's going in many different directions. There's a lot of different things being done at every level, and it requires a variety of backgrounds and experiences (to) come together.

So not only do we have the technical side of things, which is important, both at the base layer and the secondary layer, we have the business side of things, the entrepreneurial side of things, the marketing side of things, the idea side of things. I mean, there's a lot of different components. To what is taking place and it's important that this is represented in the discussions, it's represented in the people who want to stand up and say, okay, we're going to look out for or bring attention to these different components in different segments because it's very easy to overlook one area in favor of another.

For example, we are still at the point in time where there's a lot of development required. We need infrastructure, we need apps built, we need ease of use programmed in all of this stuff. So it's very easy to focus on the development side of things.

But how often do you hear a lot of attention talked about to the entrepreneurial side of things and the attention and focus of bringing entrepreneurs here? So that's just one example. And that was some of the motivation behind this. Exactly. And as Hive and the crypto space keeps evolving and keep keep going towards that corporate or that business approach that we definitely need to get more adoption.

Throughout the whole space. This is something that we believe that Hive needs. We need more organization. We need more people getting involved. We need everyone to get to research and to actually know what our blockchain is. What is how, what are our, our pros? What are the obstacles that we can face down the line, but especially to rally together, we are probably one of the most active communities in the crypto space.

And we are one of the biggest. Yes, there are blockchains who have hundreds of thousands of users, but we have one advantage. We have the social side. We have at the layer zero, we have a place where we can gather, where we can have conversations, where we can simply just align and then go out of the high space to make our voice be heard.

@moderator: Okay. So this is how spaces work, because most people here are Hive hardcore, but you don't know how spaces work. This is the very first X space that we're hosting. So the first hour we are going to go with our speakers, and then the second hour, we're just going to go through the Threadcast and then read out loud what the community has to say.

If someone else wants to speak, you can go ahead and just request to speak in the X Space and we will give you the mic, just keep it civil and keep it as informative as possible.

So you can either interact on the Threadcast or you can ask to speak here. And, um, the first space, well, this first space, uh, is just going to be an introduction to what the Hive, uh, ecosystem is and why it is important for people and for, for the community in general to get involved.

And I see that Crimsonclad is here with us, and I don't know if there's anyone more capable to explain to the community why is it important for people and for the community to get involved in the day by day activities of the blockchain, but also to get involved in governance cream? Can you explain people what governance is and why it is important for everyone here and everyone on chain?

@crimsonclad: All right. Hi everyone. My name's Crim and I've been around Hive and Steem, I suppose the legacy...

@anomadsoul: Okay, Crim is having technical issues, but Arcange has only a few minutes, so I don't know if you want to take that question, or do you just want to add to the conversation about governance? The mic is yours.

@arcange: Hello. Hello, everybody. My name is Arcange. I'm a witness and a Hive developer.

Governance is not an easy question to answer, to make it short. It's a bit, if we compare Hive to a company, it means that everybody participates. Thing in hive as a say in the management of the company. So by using your votes, you can influence in which directions our project and Hive will go.

You can also vote for witnesses. Witnesses are like a board in a company where you you delegate some of your government power to those people to decide, uh, important things. Um, that's how I would describe governance. But you need to use your power. You have a say. So you, you, you can use it to vote for witnesses, to vote for proposals, to decide where the fundings will, will go to which project you want to support. So do it doesn't cost you anything and it makes you involved in hive life. And that's, that's what I would say about governance.

moderator: Yeah, it is basically the way that anyone on chain can have a say, no matter how big your state is or how small it is, you have a say in what gets done or, or what the direction of the blockchain is. And I see crim is back here. So, uh, crim, do you want to keep going?

@crimsonclad: Sorry, I fat fingered it. It's my fault. I didn't get booted. I just blew it. Um, yeah, so I'm sorry. I don't know where I cut out guys and I'm not going to bother kind of going over my story. Um, but the reality is, is my place in this space and working with hive has has evolved a lot over the years, and I've kind of followed a journey that I think for a lot of people who come to blockchain, it's a journey that they'll relate to. If they're not in that same sort of flow yet, they will be, and that's that I started as an individual, just an end user, a content creator, just somebody who kind of stumbled into the space trying to understand where does the, the magic beans come from, what is this, this crazy internet money? And from there, you know, your understanding of it changes the way that you think about everything. And I know that sounds a bit hyperbolic, but it's true. As you kind of move around any web 3 space, but Hive in particular, Everything you do is part of governance.

Every choice you make is something that's put back in your hands and you're not coerced. You get to choose where your time, your attention, your data, your interest lies. And from there, it kind of starts shaping you to understand that everything you do has value. And it's a really fascinating way for you to understand the world differently.

And I think it's It's a great way of shaping your thought. So governance around blockchain, but specifically governance around hive. As Arcange mentioned there are really sort of tangible forms of governance, which is voting for your witnesses, your block producers. These are the people who run software and servers that secure the chain and actually, you know, Check, order, and lock transactions into the blockchain.

You have got governance decisions on our DAO mechanism, which is the DHF, and that is a decentralized fund that actually trustlessly disperses funds based on people's opinions and their votes around the chain, all stakeholders. But there's more to governance as well, and that's the ownership aspect. And ownership, in this case, is you In having a sort of strong control over everything that you want to do on the blockchain and that governance goes beyond just choosing what happens for other people, but that governance goes into choosing what happens for you, and that's something that's taken away from you in most web2 websites in most web 2 services, they own everything and you basically have to adhere to what they want, whether that's censorship or whether that's, you know, simply just shaping your behavior.

Hive is a place where you can work with other people and develop a community and a social. set of ideals that you can work towards in a way that allows you to have full agency over what you do on the internet, which is why I have become so incredibly passionate about it, both from a tech side, but also from a social side.

@moderator:It all comes down to accountability and responsibility. It doesn't matter how big or small you are. You need to know why do you have to get involved with this? It's not just about saying what matters to you, but also about thinking of what is best for the blockchain, and Khal, I think that all of this stems to one main concept.

How do we make people get more involved in governance? For example, there is 400 million Hive. There's a 160 million hive staked in the, in the ecosystem, but only around 80 million are voting for witnesses. And only around 25, well, 28 million right now is voting for the return proposal. Why is it important for people to get involved.

@khaleelkazi: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple different ways you can, you can kind of separate it. I think one is, uh, you know, from a, from an on chain kind of development perspective, I think there's some things that can be done, uh, that encourage voting in general. Um, you know, one, one great change in my opinion was, uh, witness decay voting, so if you don't vote after a certain period of time, your your votes no longer get registered.

So it kind of encourages people to come back. Um, so I know you mentioned that, like, 80 million stake is active right now, and a lot of the the inactive stake is from people who have been stakeholders for a long time that are kind of often on the block chain so, I think there's stuff that you can do at the blockchain level. I think at the, you know, when you come up from the blockchain level and you look at. You know, from a community level, I think, you know, stuff like this, that encourages people to, you know, it basically serves as both a reminder and an education.

Some people actually have been on high for, and I've talked to them, you know, for 6 or 7 years. And they, they don't even know how the DHF works. They don't really even understand witness voting that much. Um, you know, they just create content and they're active, but they're not, you know, active in the, in the on chain government stuff.

They're more at, at kind of like the surface level of, you know, create content, engage and do stuff like that. One thing I'd like to see more of is, is encouraging people to not only learn about. Why are witnesses important? But also what is each witness doing?

How active are they on the block chain? And some witnesses don't post. So I know a lot of people look at it and they're like, Oh, well, this witness hasn't posted in six months. And to be fair to those witnesses, posting is not everything. A lot of those witnesses are actually very active at the block chain level and in terms of developing their own projects, so a big way to get people involved is, is for witnesses to, to maybe, you know, be speakers on, on town halls like this and talk about some of the stuff they're doing. I think, I think a big thing that I've noticed is that a lot of hivers aren't really familiar with the witnesses and don't really understand what each of them do.

So I think a big way is, is have the witnesses do outreach.

@monderator: It is pretty hard because on the one hand you want to that do not care about what happens on the backend. That do not care what the technology is, and they just focus on probably gaming or creating content or using the fitness dapps or just being involved with hive, but on the other hand, you want them to be involved on what happens on the background. So it's kind of a 2 2 side coin taskmaster, so, how can we build the bridge between having normal users from web to come to web3, come to Hive as a home and ask them to get involved when all they want is just to play a game or post cat pictures or, or just engage with other people?

How can we bridge this?

And by the way, spaces normally don't work as someone moderating it. If you want to speak, just raise your hand. It's the little heart icon there next next to the comments. We will just be passing the microphone from 1 to from 1 to another. So, you're mortal welcome.

@taskmaster4450: To answer your question, I would say that it's just a continual process.

Ultimately, I don't think everybody's going to care about governance. And, and maybe rightly so if you're here just to do some simple things and engage and use a few apps, play a game, whatever, fine. That, that's your utility of the ecosystem. I think for the more serious people and the people who are looking at building, whether that's an application, whether it's a game, whether it's your brand, whether it's your business, then governance becomes a very, very important issue.

I think that's the versatility that Hive can offer is that. If somebody just shows up and wants to loosely use it for a few simple applications, okay, no problem. But I think as people go further and deeper into the ecosystem, that's where the education becomes important.

That's where saying, okay, you are somebody who is more than just a casual user just here to post a few, few threads or use like it to, or play a couple of Splinterlands games here and there. You have some more serious intentions. You see greater potential. Governance is obviously something very important.

And I think this ties back to the multifaceted approach, something like HPUD, that can be linked to governance and the discussion around age. But why are you powering up? Why do we have this contest? What does this do for your governance? Well, by powering up and getting more high power, it gives you a greater say in what takes place on the blockchain.

So like anything else with Hive it's an extremely complex system, which I've always said is a great thing because that's why there's so many opportunities cropping up. It takes time. I think it's worth people's time to invest and learn, but to expect somebody to come in to play a few games of Splinterlands to want to dive deep into governance, I think that's just unrealistic.

So I think it's one of those where we offer, if you will, the cafeteria plans. There's opportunities for the one who's just a casual Splinterlands buyer, and there's somebody who's coming here who wants to build a multi million dollar business.

@moderator: It almost prompts us to work together as dApps and figure out when is a Hive user worth approaching to get involved in governance, or when is that user going to care about governance?

@l337m43732:** Yeah, so apologies for my connection, spaces obviously didn't want me to speak so you guys, you guys really, really said a lot of things that I was thinking myself when I was trying to get reconnected, you know, we have the people that are super tech savvy, and then we have the other side of people that just want to play Splinterlands or whatever they do.

But at some point we do want to attempt to at least get them involved in what's happening, like maybe get them to one of these town hall meetings, you know? But I think we should have a dynamic way to, um, say when we should approach that user, maybe they get to a hundred hive power or something like that, and maybe the front ends start to bug them and say, Hey, look we know you're here to just play in Splinterlands, but there's something deeper here. And if you want to get involved, maybe jump on one of these town halls. That's part of all of these dApps coming together to get more people involved. So, I think that's something we could do.

Obviously not everybody cares about the back end. Not everybody cares about the tech, but... Those people should still have a say and they deserve to be heard. So that's my main thing with these town halls. We need to be the voice of those people or at least attempt at being their voice.

@moderator: Just having this this kind of me of meetings that we used to have a lot back like criminal, like Crimson Cloud said, uh, we used to have this. I don't know if they were every 15 days or every month, but a lot of people joined. There were 200, 300 people at the same time on this court.

We decided to do it on spaces because this is the main way that we can attract more people organically. If you are joining a space and you're a speaker, all of your followers will get a prompt from the DAP. Well, from, from the app, sorry, it's a centralized app. X is super centralized, but users will get a prompt on their notifications to join if they seen someone they follow is speaking in the space.

So wrestling online organization is speaking here, do you want to join this space?

And then organically we can get more people. And the point is, or the goal is if we are 10k social users on hive, we could easily have 5,000 here in this space. And this could actually mean something.

Khal, what's up?

@Khaleelkazi: Yeah. I was just going to say, I saw a couple comments in the threadcasts where people were asking what governance is. And I know we kind of touched on the two forms of voting, like witnesses and DHF, but Eric, do you maybe want to define what governance is and maybe more of the basics, here's what governance is, here's the types of governance and here's what you'd vote on.

@moderator: This is exactly why the @town-hall witness has different people. For example, Johngolson, Taskmaster and Nifty, because we all have different, approaches and different backgrounds. And I think Taskmaster is more prepared to answer that question. So yeah, that's me just, uh, washing my hands and letting Task explain that.