For anyone following closely, I think it has always been clear that the funds established in the DHF were for future develop/marketing/etc. The code for converting the Hive to HBD has been discussed repeatedly for a long time, including in the public dev discussions and onchain posts.
From my point of view as an investor, I think it's attractive that there are funds available to make sure develop continues regardless of who is doing it. I'm aware that some people disagree, and there was a proposal to "burn" the initial development stake that Hive was established with. It's never got much traction. I think that's because many investors share my opinion that it's good to have funds allocated for future work.
As for the "retroactive" proposals for the work that BlockTrades makes: I've always been very upfront that I mostly plan to make proposals after we complete a task, rather than before we do it. That gives stakeholders an opportunity to judge the completed work, and make a decision if they think it was worth the funds we request. It's a huge benefit to stakeholders, and not one that many developers can afford to offer. I'm willing to operate under such conditions because I believe that stakeholders will recognize the value of our work and be willing to pay for it.
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it. I think the dev fund can easily justify itself in terms of cost vs value, but the network is still in an extremely tenuous centralized state. You are a very large centralized entity that needs to be trusted quite a bit. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just obviously not ideal.
Beggars can't be choosers I guess.
It's true that most of the core development is currently centralized in the BlockTrades team. To attack this problem, one of my main near-term development goals for Hive is to move more of the development work to 2nd layer apps, where new teams can work independently on their own blockchain-based applications.
Of course, that doesn't mean there still won't be accountability issues surrounding the dev work done at the 2nd layer (to the extent that some of it will likely be DHF-funded). But it should enable more devs to make proposals that users won't need to be concerned about in terms of potentially affecting the security of the base blockchain layer.