The platform Hive means a lot of things to different people. For some it represents their first foray into the World of cryptocurrency. For some it is a social network with revolutionary tendencies, while for some others it can even be a means of livelihood. In all of these, the one constant that sticks out is the financial aspect of the platform and that our accounts tend to have real life financial value which are maintained by us.

This is important because it means every Hive account is also basically a bank account run and maintained by the individual. Unlike what obtains elsewhere, we are completely liable for whatever happens to our accounts. Hive even has some advanced features that traditional banks struggle with such as instant money transfers and cross border money transfer/payments which are made seamless on the Hive chain.

Some of the more traditional banking features include an ability to save, invest and give out loans(?) I am not completely sold on the loan giving part of Hive even though projects like Neoxian seem to have pulled it off with good success rates. However, the saving and investing side of Hive are angles that have been developed on more recently with a platform like Leofinance giving us options on where to smartly put our crypto assets.

The Witnesses on Hive have also tried to promote a holding culture by setting the interest on HBD to 20% APR. This is encouraging on so many levels as it enables us save our assets while giving us returns that are competitively higher than what most banks have on offer. It should be noted that holding is a very important form of saving. Holding Hive enables us to earn more via curation and gaining more influence within the community.

Perhaps the most important feature that the Hive account has on offer is the record system it keeps that enables us to actively track our financial transactions. This record feature is more or less a bank statement that we can properly use to make adjustments in things like budgets and expenditure if we adopted Hive more widely as an alternative to traditional banking.

Conclusion

Of course sustainability is going to be a major concern going forward. For decades traditional systems have used stability as their major selling point for gaining people's trust. Hive has been a relatively stable asset so far and will need to at least maintain that trend. It is important to note however that because we are still in these early development stages the upsides are great.

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