The vast majority of blockchains are not financially self-sufficient.
By this I mean that they can't continue to run without external funding (foundations, VCs etc).
Bitcoin and HIVE are self sustaining. There are a few others, but not many.
The financial incentive to run the infrastructure for the blockchain to operate comes from the blockchain itself and the price is plenty sufficient to incentivise people to run the infrastructure.
Blockchains relying on external funding will die when the external funding is pulled or runs out. Unless they find a way to create real revenue sources outside crypto.
So one way that HIVE becomes well known is simply survival.
If there is a huge die off of other crypto, then HIVE will emerge like the mammals after the Chicxulub asteroid.
The other option for prominence is that AI discovers some of the unique and really useful features of Hive (as I outlined in my post.
If neither happen then HIVE will continue to be forgotten by most but valued by the (privileged) few. That is also OK by me.
If Hive price keeps dropping, there will be no incentive for individuals to run infrastructure for the blockchain. It will die the same way if it doesn't get external funding. Running an api node is not cheap.
The Hive price would need to drop 100x for being a top 20 witness, running a witness node not to be profitable.
Witness nodes run the blockchain.
API nodes are used by front ends to access the blockchain. They are not so expensive to run but are more than a witness node.
Hive does not die without API nodes. There are other ways to directly interact with the blockchain and many AI based uses will not need API nodes.
API nodes are the ones holding the blockchain. Witness nodes don't hold the entire blockchain.
Hive.blog is owned by blocktrades, who's been running a large team of devs out of pocket for 6 years as I mentioned in the post, thus this is kind of shortsighted to think that just cause price drops that team or others wouldn't invest out of own pocket to keep API or witness servers running.
For sure there will always be those who run infrastructure for love. I believe Hive will never die. I run a witness and my cost for a long time was higher then what I made. Still today I might be only breaking even, so it's not always about the money.
But a node can only take a certain amount traffic, and blocktrades or others running this for love can only take so much. More traffic and less nodes means bad service, and users leaving, or not staying.
The amount of funds he's spent over the past 6 years on his team compared to API nodes of a shrinking userbase I think are if I were to guess a tiny fraction. Thankfully this also scales with users the same way as price.
let's hope that blocktrades lives forever...