At this stage in the game I'd much rather see tokens freely given to people rather than burning them.

The entire point of the inflation is to distribute the token as broadly as possible, as it's the network effect that creates the value, not scarcity in itself. In five years, no one will care if there's 400 million Hive or 40 million Hive if we're at 10,000 daily active users. It'll be worthless either way.

Consider it our marketing spend. If we were a coroporation we'd be in our startup phase. There's no way we should be fretting about cutting our marketing budget in favor of stock buybacks.

Sub 10% inflation and falling is easily overcome by new investment. If someone doesn't believe the Hive economy will grow by more than 10% per year, they're not going to invest anyway.

The only burn that's good right now is burning 3 Hive for each account creation. Most applications and front ends don't have enough discounted account creation tokens to handle a large influx of new users. If we want to burn 300,000 Hive let's at least do it setting up 100,000 new accounts. Or quite possibly 37,500 new accounts with a 5 Hive welcome gift on each.