When I first joined Hive in late 2017, bitcoin and the altcoins were all having a run. I was making more money trading cryptos than I was blogging. I didn't know anyone or have experience blogging. I cannot say the same thing now. Except there is a lot of potential in the stock markets and cryptos seem to be waking up.

As for Hive (or Steem), it's still based on the price of BTC, so I value it relative to BTC. If I can make more money investing in BTC why not?

I do like having Hive though because I notice my curation and inflation returns are always increasing, especially if the price rises. The rewards are far from perfect and a ton of people have acknowledged this. The DAO is also a little off. I'm also a little confused about some of the proposals, but most of the really weird ones aren't funded. However, I do think developers' files/resources and even server maintenance costs are good.

That said, I'm not planning to power down everything (except Steem), but I am removing some of the investment that I bought with BTC and powered up which was over half all my HP. I've decided that for now, I will remove exactly 12.5k Hive (the amount I bought on exchanges like Binance). The Steem I sell on top of this can be considered a healthy profit. I'll definitely be ahead of the game both in terms of USD and BTC.

The reason I'm not leaving is because I've seen my rewards go up a lot since bidbots were pseudo banned last fall. Then they have also been going up since the split of Hive and Steem. I do feel things are fair if you put in a fair amount of effort.

A lot of people in the inner circle you mention have put in a ton of work and are doing things we don't fully understand. In any case, from a pure investment perspective, why should I give a crap? If my investment is doing good (it is), why should I care if others are doing better? I don't know if it will hold back Hive long term. I assessed the situation when Justin bought Steemit and reassessed when Hive was successfully launched. My next assessment comes at the end of Q2 which is coincidently when everyone will have had just over 13 weeks to power down most of their Hive and Steem. In my assessment, they have already stabilized the blockchain and added lots of exchanges (too many in my opinion). However, there is still consideration about roadmap, dao funded (especially non-airdropped stuff), and actions of Steemit which Hive cannot really control but present risk to keep an eye on nonetheless.

I think Hive can do it, but I also understand winding down your investment. I think you should stay at some capacity. Just lease out some Hive and keep like 500HP in your account so you can autovote. 10~12% isn't a bad ROI. Think in terms of BTC or ETH, only massive mining operations that essentially just solve equations based on artificial difficulty get the inflation. Hive is a paradise of equality and oppertunity by comparison.