(freestyle rant) Investor reliance and DHF treasury trap: Opt-in ads, subscriptions and paid reddit-style awards would not be the end of the world for Hive. DHF devs and witnesses need liquidity, not a zero sum game.

How can Hive support itself without being a zero sum game? We need to keep funding developer teams but we can't rely only on people buying HIVE (participation) and HBD (debt) for that.

Every time I think about Hive it hits me how harsh it is the reality that to fund the DHF proposals we need people buying HIVE to support the price. Yes, the DHF was funded with tokens from the fork etc... But when the funded DEVS NEED TO SELL to pay their salaries (in fiat, one way or another), servers, teams etc... For it to be sustainable people need to buy the tokens they are selling. There is no way around it.

Now imagine we enter a bear market in such a low market cap... The DHF teams will need to keep selling to fund whatever they are building, but who is going to buy?...

The DHF risk being a treasury trap, a constant source of sell pressure. It is necessary to grow the ecosystem, onboard people, develop new apps... But also it is dangerous at very low volumes, low liquidity and low market cap....

This is the reason we need to leave the zero sum game mentality behind. Hive needs opt-in ads and subscriptions. I would more than happily opt-in to see ads on my favorite Hive frontend if I knew that the ad revenue would be used, even if only half of it, to buy HIVE and support the price. Price support is extremely necessary to support the ecosystem.

I do believe that even under a heavy price crash, HBD depeg and difficulty financing teams through DHF fund due to low liquidity on the off-chain markets (to sell tokens for fiat so devs can get paid and survive) still some teams will keep this running, but seeing our market cap so low at what could possibly be the beginning of a bear market scares me.

# A few ideas I wrote down freesyle

• opt-in ads on frontends, using part of the ad revenue to buy HIVE

• opt-in subscriptions, where a part of the subscription is paid in "cashback" as HIVE and the user gets perks

• awards, like Reddit, where users can burn HIVE to award posts and comments they like

• promoted posts where the HIVE is burned (or partially)

• market integration, so people can sell products, services and do business on Hive

• affiliate marketing done healthly, without multi level stuff, to generate volume and maybe burn commissions

At this point anything that can drive up either HIVE purchases or burning is helpful. DHF distribution must continue, but we can't let it become a treasury trap, and for that we need demand, market cap, volume and most importantly liquidity.

I think I bought 1000 HIVE a few months ago and powered up, that felt like doing my part, I don't even spend that much money on any subscription service but bought it to support it. We can't expect people to buy to profit because that would relying on investment for financing, that is fragile, it has worked for years but is fragile. Hive can't expect users to keep investing to fund development, where does it end? That would be a zero sum game without some other source of revenue.