Good to see you posting. You should do it more often!
For me, the (unique?) Value of Hive is as a blockchain for communities. So if you have an online game, an arts app, a premiership football supporters club, a university sorority, a local council, an online business etc etc then Hive can provide you with:
- Your own cryptocurrency for your community.
- A blockchain to store assets (assets for your game / NFTs for works made by your artists / collectibles for your football supporters).
- Online marketplace (for these collectibles / NFTs / or even ordinary goods).
- A governance structure for running / voting in your community.
- Built in finance options: financial transfers / fundraising / loans etc with full transparency.
- Incentivization of tasks and development (as you point out above).
- A forum for community discussion with the potential to reward community members for their ideas and contributions / showcase work / advertise goods / provide information etc.
- Community roles: moderation etc.
- Interaction between communities (e.g. a standardised SMT offering for all football clubs so that fans can use their own club crypto across many club offerings).
- And all of the above pretty much for free (with the requirement to hold a certain amount of Hive for RCs).
And then you market this to all the world's communities as a (simple!) option to en-crypto their community.
The value of Hive then comes from being:
- The entry coin for all these SMTs and communities.
- Necessity for RCs for each community / member.
- Participation into governance of the overall blockchain.
The underlying SMTs probably provide more upside potential for value. So some form of Defi allowing Hive investors to invest across a fund of SMTs (without doing any work), delegate Hive in return for SMTs, securely loan funds to communities with collateral / margin / escrow could bring that value through to investors.
Hey, I posted a similar proposal, but I'd like to keep it simple for people who are barely used to social media, even if that means limiting features like tokens.
I think that there could be a range of tools and options available at the discretion of each community.
Some communities may only be interested in an immutable forum. For others the opportunity to store assets / NFTs may be key with perhaps the potential to trade them against Hive or Bitcoin.
But I think that SMTs need to be an available option for each community if they want one. It just widens the potential for what you can do as a community if you have your own finance and rewards.