It has demand. In fact, the demand for HIVE is way out of proportion to the size of the attention economy on the platform. That's because speculative trading against BTC is overwhelmingly the most financially valuable use case at the moment.
Amateur content creators who wish to earn on their content and who know about Hive but choose not to participate are idiots, pure and simple. The rewards for everyone on Hive are out of this world relative to the amount of work it takes to succeed here.
I've meant not speculative demand but utility demand. And those are two very different beasts where with a speculative demand it will remain spinning in circle of traders where with utility demand it would go to mass adoption.
Either type of demand lets content creators sell their tokens at a very lucrative price compared to the effort it took to earn them. The two sources of demand are completely indistinguishable to the seller.
Ofc they are but they compliment each other in synergy. Speculative price will wear off in time if it has no real value, hence utility.
If the speculation were primarily on HIVE itself, then I would agree completely. HIVE is not a store of value type of asset at all. But I think much of the speculative value is not about HIVE at all but Bitcoin. If HIVE only had fiat trading pairs, that would be very bad, unless we are able to demonstrate real progress generating utility value. But the traders actually see HIVE as a vehicle to gain access to more BTC. HIVE has many trading pairs against BTC and HIVE is very volatile, making it the perfect vehicle for a speculative gambler. If Bitcoin moons and achieves a six figure dollar value or beyond, I'm guessing HIVE will go to heights never seen before in the history of STEEM let alone the short history of HIVE.
The above is a real possibility making all the cat pictures that earned 50 cents potentially massive earners. The only thing that, in my opinion, can throw us off that course is investors losing interest in the altcoin space as a whole. HIVE is not some random very small cap coin that has nothing going for it. The Justin Sun debacle generated quite a lot of interest and got many heavyweights interested in Hive.
Hive fiat value remains relatively the same when BTC gets volatile. So i would not blame BTC for Hive volatility at all. Sometimes players play pump and dump on Hive itself increasing it's Btc and Fiat value altogether. But that does not change the point. As of now Hive has little value apart from speculative, either it is trading actively or hodling it long term expecting appreciation in price, does not make a difference.
The question is, what you can use Hive for? And the answer is "you can currently use Hive for nothing".