Thanks so much for your considered response. I understand you completely, but the 10K was just an arbitrary number when I was trying to decide how much might make a difference to a struggling farmer in a developing country. In this fantasy, it also assumed that I was a billionaire, and that I'd already have a huge bag and that helping someone with some HIVE wouldn't empty my coffers.

My account at its peak was actually getting there before I had to liquidate it to help an ill relative, the matriarch of our family. I'm the responsible one in a family full of drug addicts, and do what I can to protect my relative from these leeches that tended to prey on her in her golden years.

Understand that I come from nothing. 5 kids raised by a single mom (from 4 different men), none of whom ever married her, leaving her to foot all the expenses of raising those kids.

We never had enough food, and at one point only had butter and starch to eat (I kid you not). My mother spent what little money she had on cigarettes, booze and yes, lottery tickets. She'd force us to sell seeds or greeting cards as little kids door-to-door, and then spend the proceeds on those things. So believe me, I know what irresponsible people can do with their money.

My mother had planned to put me up for adoption when I was born. She was to give me away to my aunt (the one I'm helping), and I would have grown up thinking my mother was my aunt, and my aunt was my mother.

Can you imagine?

She refused to apply for welfare or any type of assistance, and we were only saved when my empty stomach loudly growled when I was called upon to stand and read a verse from The Bible during a church service. We weren't allowed to tell anyone we were short of food, but the eagle-eyed female pastor knew what she was seeing and sent loads of food to our house and warned my mother not to beat her 10-year-old son for telling her.

The pastor also demanded that my mother sign up for welfare telling her "even if you're too proud for it, these kids shouldn't suffer" and that if she didn't, she'd have the kids taken away from her. She introduced her to an amazing social worker who while we lived in that city, helped to turn things around for us.

She always told us that she wanted more money, but when I got older, I told her that if she had a lot of money, she'd just buy more booze, cigs and lottery tickets. Roughly 3 times a year, she'd "hit" on the lottery and win a few hundred bucks. She'd win say $1000 per year, but would spend more than 3K in the process, always chasing losses. She's still the same to this day, I had to move out to avoid throwing money into a black hole with her.

So believe me, I know.

When you grow up always hungry and dreaming of food, you don't ever want to go through that again or ever see another child go through that either. And I get what you saying here when you wrote:

If you had a million HIVE, you could do this 100 times. Dropping 10k. Is 100 times actually a big number? we have 8 billion people on the planet. Dropping on only 100 can really seem unfair. How will you choose who to help, and who not to help?

I'm reminded of an old tale of a man walking along the beach. A stranger sees him walking up to starfish stranded by the waves, picking them up and placing them back into the ocean. One after another he keeps doing this and the stranger says "Why are you helping these starfish? There must be millions of them on beaches all over the world. So what you're doing won't matter as it can't possibly make a dent in the population." The man bent down to save another starfish and said, "It matters to this one."

And that's where I'm coming from. I never forgot those nights of going to bed with an empty, painful, grumbling stomach. No, we can't save everybody, and there must be a thoughtful vetting process. But if I became a billionaire, I would not ever want to hog all of that money to myself and not make a difference in someones life.

I had a choice. I could help my elderly aunt or be selfish and grow my account on Hive. I made the right choice for a woman who was more a mother to me than my actual mom was. Now we return to (hopefully) growing on Hive. :)