My First Personal Blog after the Hive Fork

The past few months have been a wild ride. Since the Covid-19 outbreak, the world as we knew seems to have disappeared with all of us having to adjust to a new world where we have to practice social distancing and in constant fear of catching a new strain of the virus that might become a real existential risk to humanity. This new threat does not discriminate where you come from. It does not matter if you come from a developing country like mine The Philippines or a first world country like Italy when this threat strikes all you can do is prepare of yourself for the onslaught and hope and pray that it will come to past.

Personally, the current situation has not affected me significantly since I always stay at home and do most of my work and social functions online, I can only imagine the thousands of people in my country that is now suffering due to the many effects of this pandemic. I wonder what would happen for the homeless, especially the aged? What would happen to families with a hand-to-mouth existence? While I can go around complaining about these social injustices online what help would it do? It might only result in discord, chaos, and misinformation. Worst, I might be labeled as someone who is peddling fake news. I don't want additional stress, especially that I am now going into my 2nd-trimester of pregnancy.

Then just this month the Steemit Inc. was sold to the founder of Tron, Justin Sun which created much friction within the community. Honestly, I was hoping that with the new funds and through Justin's marketing initiatives Steem will, at last, deliver on its development promises as well as achieve mass adoption. I am not at all bothered with the sale of Steemit Inc it is, after all, a private entity. Like it or not without Steemit Inc STEEM would have not came into existence. While it is true that the community developers and governance played an important role in making STEEM grow to what it is today, I think, none of this would have existed without its founders Ned and Dan.

Many of the people I looked up to in this platform thinks that Justin Sun will make Steem more centralized. It is possible that he may to a certain degree but then again you cannot dismiss that possibility that he may not. I have interacted with many steemians about this matter and I have just come to the conclusion that many of them just do not trust Justin which makes me wonder do they personally know Justin? Surprisingly some of these people whom I respect came off as racist essentially saying Justin is of Chinese descent and thus he cannot be trusted.

What saddens me even further is the fact that those who want to stay neutral are shunned or downvoted into oblivion. I asked myself is this the kind of decentralization I want? I do not feel safe expressing myself freely in Steemit before hopefully under the new leadership it will be more inclusive and less hostile to dissenting views. I expect Hive to remain very similar to the old steem before the hard fork you will see the same people or personas hogging most of the rewards. After the "honeymoon" stage I won't be surprised to see fragmentations and infighting among themselves with no real leadership will take place.

With all the bravado I have heard in the town hall meetings they so easily gave up on STEEM, they just can't walk-the-talk. I mean they did not even last a month. I feel sorry for those who invested heavily in STEEM just to upvote the witnesses to keep the fight. But on the other hand, they like to believe that they effectively doubled their money. Since I am also a recipient of the airdrop I would love to see Hive increase its value but I don't see that anytime soon. Many of the exchanges negotiated with Steemit Inc when they listed STEEM and since Hive supporters practically defaulted themselves from being the incumbent STEEM they will be treated as a new listing.

The biggest loss in this event are the community developers of STEEM but this impact can be mitigated by hiring blockchain professionals and other community developers who may step up coming from the silent and less represented community developer members. While it is true that a lot of developers left STEEM they are not actually irreplaceable. I will not be surprised if many developers from South Korea, China, and other regions step up. I would expect some TRON developers to look into STEEM and try to develop the platform or perhaps integrate the technology into TRON and vice versa.

However, I am excited to see the Tron community start using Steemit as their main blogging platform. That is one of the main categories that Tron is sorely lacking. In fact, a lot of the dapps in Steem blockchain are quite unique compared to Tron Dapps but most serve the same use-case with different user interfaces only. While Steemit may lose many of its former users they will be replaced by Tron community members. I also expect to see some of the former steemit users to stick around who will be observing and perhaps be naughty once and a while which will add some spice in the whole new steemit experience under new governance and a new bunch of new users.