Eventually (hopefully) the demand on Hive is stronger than for the desire for BTC, where more people are looking to get some Hive and will be willing to skip straight in. Most in crypto now have been in crypto for awhile, but eventually, that won't be the case.
For nearly all attempts to earn on the other platforms, most will fail to earn anything, yet all will pay a cost.
We need utility for hive for it to have demand.
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".
The utility I have for it at the moment is that it increases the enjoyment in playing the Hive game. People sink a lot more into entertainment than what they do into Hive, even though Hive is far more entertaining :)
Yeah, but's that's not utility per say it's gamification, which is also valuable just a different angle I've meant in my comment :)
A different angle for sure, more like the utility of buying weapons in WoW (is that a thing) :D
But it is a utility that people value, it gives a reason to buy, hold and use the token actively in the space.
It's not utility by definition :) In WoW case it's currency and gamification :) And entertainment certainly has a lot of value and people are willing to pay quite a lot for those injections of serotonin and dopamine into their systems through that mechanism.
But i would argue that Hive is as much entertaining as WoW if we excluded that hope factor for a huge bull run :) Not yet at least, but some dapps might be. And if i could push my post to 100k of targeted views using Hive that would have utility as exposure or paid traffic and acting like a currency to pay for it.
Or if i could pay 30% of price in Hive (think as a discount) for my new PS5 Hive would act as currency and utility for sales promotion. Meaning - you are Sony. You want to sell PS5 at a discount anyway. Cost before discount is 500 bucks. Discounted deal is 400 bucks. Now instead of that you can make a proposal.
Pay 400 bucks and 100 Hive for a brand new PS5.
So for user it would cost 420, Sony would get some Hive to promote their posts and sales on Hive. As for Hive it would mean that 1 Hive is actually worth 1 USD.
Win Win Win
I see Hive a bit like electricity, and electricity does have utility :D
I think that the Sony scenario is possible and if enough companies did that, it would also give them the potential to sell that same PS5 for multiples more if the price changes. Kind of like that pizza store who sold two pizzas for 10,000 BTC, did they hold? :D
Damn them if they did, the best business opportunity then lol
Once Hive's use case as a way to trade against BTC to gain more BTC goes away, that will be the case for Hive, too. The failure of BTC would be a complete disaster for Hive, unless Hive already had a very large user base made up by consumers who do not mind paying a little bit for Hive Power just to be able to participate.