I should have known better than to drop in on Cryptogee. Somehow that bugger always manages to trigger a thought process requiring a long-winded response.

Ha! Glad to see I bring out the best in you! 😂

You make a lot of good points above, especially about this @chillfire bloke leveraging Hive in a unique way to promote his NFTs.

However I will say one thing, and I've said this to you before when I came back from Steemfest 3, Hive is not just the blogging site and your early comments made me realise you haven't quite got it yet.

Sure, those are valid points regarding the 14,000 users on Hive being tiny compared to the communities of the big chains. However did you realise that Splinterlands has over 300,000 users? That's massive, and that game is on the Hive blockchain, meaning there are 300,000 extra users you didn't account for.

Also Splinterlands is a trading card type game, and it could be argued that it was the first NFT game. As you're aware the first-to-market tag can be extremely valuable. As well as the 300k + users, I met a guy on here the other day who said he streamed Splinterlands on Twitch, and not only that, there are a whole bunch of people streaming on there.

Why is this news huge? Because Twitch is a popular platform (doubled in size in the past year) and people enjoy watching people stream games. I'm sure you won't be surprised that many people who watch these games don't actually play them, but get into playing them from watching these streamers. In fact the guy I met on here said that he got into Splinterlands because of watching another stream.

All of this means more eyeballs and more attention on the Hive Blockchain. Splinterlands owner @aggroed was very clever early on, and he made sure other cryptos could be used to purchase cards, so not everyone uses Hive on Splinterlands.

This though can be seen as a bonus, because it means people from other chains are spending time playing a game on the Hive chain.

At the end of the day I get it, you're old fashioned like me. Hive, previously Steemit, for us represented the coin, they are one and the same. People used to tell me back in those days when I complained about the quality of the site and the lack of marketing, that it was not all about the site and I shouldn't get so hung up on it.

I didn't really get them until Steemfest 3 and now it's abundantly clear to me that the success of Hive as a blogging site is independent to the success of the coin.

All of that being said though, I would like to see a lot of changes to the site. I think so much can be done to improve the look and feel of it. But none of that stops me from being optimistic about the future of the Hive Blockchain.

Cg