Thanks for the thoughtful comment! Glad to hear from someone else who's dug deep into HIVE.
Great point about quadratic voting - I hadn't fully considered the multi-account workaround. You're right that whales could just split their stake. Maybe the friction of managing multiple accounts makes it slightly harder, but yeah, probably not a real solution.
Your comment about ads being app-specific got me thinking though. What if an ad network could be implemented at the blockchain level? Advertisers buy ads, publishers (dapps or creators) get paid for showing them, and a portion goes to the reward pool or token buybacks. That way the whole ecosystem benefits, not just individual apps. Not sure if it's technically feasible, but seems worth exploring.
Good point about positioning and marketing too. Do you think HIVE's challenge is attracting builders, or giving them enough reason to stay once they're here? What do you see as HIVE's clearest value proposition to builders?
Thanks for your reply. I generally think that blockchains should enable their builders to create sustainable business (rather than e.g. handing out grants). It's of course a bit tough to create a business on top of the daily rewards being paid out, so there needs to be more than that (especially as cashing out rewards wouldn't improve anything you mentioned in your post).
So it begs the question what Hive is really good at / what makes it special. This is where everything should start. Let's try the example of "pays you for posting on a social platform". That's always been a cool claim, and while you can also earn posting on X nowadays, there's still some space to cover a niche.
Now the first problem with this will be what the business model of a business utilizing this superpower of Hive would be - apps like Ecency sell services on top of the posting so users can earn more rewards. Now of course the business will then depend on HIVE price.
So my thinking would be to do it the other way around: instead of aiming to create more apps that essentially do the same (a frontend for the Hive blockchain, essentially), how about we get existing apps to integrate Hive for their posts so their users can earn for creating content. I think I've seen a plugin for some fitness app somewhere, if this were integrated into that app, that would actually be brilliant. A (small) portion of the revenue of this app could then be used to programmatically buy HIVE and vote for those posts created by users of the app.
This is how I imagine good BD to look like.
Aha, and regarding the idea of a decentralized ad network. This would be great, if it can be pulled off. The biggest issue here, in my eyes, is the difficulty of tracking impressions or clicks (the most common performance metrics) in a decentralized way. It's rather easy to just plug into Google Ads as a website, though.