With more people come more merchants, with a bigger widespread come more people, at some point there should be enough people here who directly earn, stake, get interest etc to make the bridging from hive to lightning unnecessary because they can pay with hive/hbd directly and the merchants who have a hive/hbd account + an exchange account would be happy to accept that directly, especially with a stable hbd. I'm not too concerned about the costs of proposals going towards paying for conferences and events that spread the word of Hive, no matter the location or how impactful it is, it's a good first step towards marketing "in the real world" and at the same time all these people who go to the conferences are more established and rewarded and at the same time incentivized to bring more people in because they're receiving rewards in more ways than the person next to them discussing other projects cause of how Hive L1 works here where contributions are rewarded in many ways.