December LPUD - The Last Leo Power Up Day of 2023

It's the 15th of the month, and that can mean only one thing; LPUD !

I powered up 150 LEO, and that means that despite all the distractions of real life, I've managed to participate in every LPUD of the year. There should be a Hivebuzz badge for that 😁

Image by Ajay Lalu from Pixabay

My 2024 LEO Strategy

I've been very much playing the long game with LEO. Being honest, it's a lower priority right now than building up my HP and HBD stacks. But EDS and LEO are the two Hive Engine tokens I'm most focused on.

Most of my posting is to non-Leo communities, so I only get a little bit of LEO from posting and commenting. The majority of LEO I earn is through delegation. Some of that is Hive Power. But almost all of my LEO is delegated to @meowcurator to generate a return in more LEO. The logic is that until I get to about 10K LEO, I'll earn more from delegation than from curation rewards.

So for 2024, it's going to me more of the same. I'm aiming to slowly and steadily increase my delegations. Additionally, I'll be monitoring the LEO price more closely with the aim of buying some every time there is a dip. By the end of 2023, I expect to have added about 2000 LEO during the course of the year. I'm hoping that during 2024 I can increase that to 3000 added during the year.

Why I Like Leo

There's one main reason why I like Leo (I'm not sure if I should say "LeoFinance" or "InLeo"...). It is the determination to reach outside the established Hive user base when recruiting new members.

Hive is still a very small community compared to the legacy social media platforms. I believe it's essential that we grow our numbers. This brings in more capital, makes InLeo attractive to advertisers, and increases the likelihood of hitting a "critical mass" where the wider world hears of us and wants to join to see what the buzz is.

InLeo has made vast strides in terms of social media functionality, with Threads, advertising, etc.

But I feel that what we need to really propel Hive to the next level are more applications which appeal to a broader spectrum of internet users. The kind of thing where the application is what sells it and we don't even have to talk about crypto to potential users. Awful as it sounds, too many people I've spoken to have backed away as soon as crypto is mentioned.

But there are things we could launch which would use the blockchain behind the scenes as a database (which is basically all it is). I'll be honest, I don't have the coding knowledge or time to learn how to code these things !

Games are definitely a big opportunity. If Hive encompassed two or three more games (but from different genres) as huge as Splinterlands has become, and incentivise those users to dip into other parts of the ecosystem, it would be a massive boost.

I believe there is also a big opportunity to act as an immutable store of data and/or images. This might need the number of nodes to be increased to ensure we could reliably store and process all the extra data.

This is something that would be especially useful for small businesses. For example, for my business, very little of the data I store is super-sensitive, it just needs to be lightly encrypted to prevent casual viewing.

My concerns are more about global corporations like Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft adding my data into what they already hold and using it against me (or my customers or suppliers once the limited data I keep is aggregated with everything else they hold). It's also the risk that companies like Dropbox might abruptly change their terms of service in ways that lose data or charge for access to it.

A Hive blockchain-based backup service would create a permanent record and could be semi-secure. If it interests me, I would hope it's something other small businesses would be willing to pay a reasonable amount for. Think of it as a "gateway drug" to the Hive ecosystem, especially if other business-focused tools could be added. Then, when the user base is big enough, paid "pull" advertising that meets Web3 principles would be a natural revenue generator for Hive.