Truly amazing this blockchain. I only write content and curate, knowing nothing about dev or code or anything like that. All I see is a system that creates money out of nothing, as much money as you want, from an unlimited pool. What magic. And it gets given away to me and other creators who have never bought any Hive. And we just get rich on it - at least here in South Africa where the currency is not worth much, I can live off this free pool of Hive money. I used to think Hive was going to increase n value and that I should just hodl until it rises in BTC value if nothing else, but from what you are saying here, Hive will always stay at $0.20 max. Oh well time to sell.
Yeh, money does not come from thin air, it is always coming from somebody's else's pocket: whether it is an inflation of our paper money (printing national currency) or a fractional reserve banking system (managed to give out 65X more credits than money in existence), government bonds, company IPOs, derivatives and many other creative forms of I-Owe-You (IOUs).
In comparison, cryptos allow us check out from that crazy paper (or digital) fiat money system. Cryptos are not IOUs, cannot be easily printed and all other things you already know.
As for HIVE vs Bitcoin - hard to say. Bitcoin is heavily manipulated via derivatives (futures on CME and more). HIVE is a very inconvenient crypto to manipulate, because much of it is being used in live operations. It is much easier to manipulate assets which are bought mostly for speculation (ex. Bitcoin).