Old friend, I am not here to hostile. Let me try to address a few of your comments here, I hope we can keep it civil.

Splinterlands is worth about 500M dollars currently - would it be worth as much if they had to pay for transactions?

500M dollars frankly is small in the big scheme of things. We are still early, and even now many shit coins still are valued at hundreds of millions. If you really want to quote value, we can look at the Hive market cap. Hive market cap currently is

Plenty of people can run nodes - You can run a node. @arcange even broke down the electricity costs - full + half node = 100W - that is the power of a lightbulb.

Oke first of all, it is nice that you can run a node, that's cool, but it doesn't stop for the consensus layer to be not centralized, it basically comes down to the 21 top witnesses. Do you agree?

About the nodes, a different subject but relevant: are there incentives to run the node? Do I get paid when I run a node?

Most of the voting stake isn't in curation guilds, it is just that they can make push individual posts up. The curation here isn't really centralized at all - except by stake.

"Except by stake" there is a contradiction there, do you see it? If stake gets centralized to a few big curation guilds then those few curation guilds basically determine which content gets to be seen. While on traditional social media, it depends on the user.

Also, you seem to make the assumption that the people who have worked hard on Hive, only hold HIVE - that is not the case. Looking at a Hive wallet for whether a person has been financially successful, is very much judging a book by its cover. For example, there are dozens of Splinterlands millionaires with very little HIVE, but without Hive, they wouldn't be millionaires.

This only demonstrates my point, hive is not something people want to hold because its economical broken, so they rather hold other crypto such as splinterlands. The BIG problem with this that I was talking about above, is that applications in this case splinterlands are build on Hive the blockchain. The blockchain which is the foundation for the splinterlands application, which other applications would want to build on that? The success of splinterlands is real, but it is made on a broken blockchain, what will happen if the base layer aka Hive fails? Many application will take this into account. Thus for hive to become an applications layer (which btw I did know this was the direction and if you read blog post again you will see I mentioned this), hive has to make hive economical sustainable first, and this is not the case.

I wouldn't want to build my house on broken ground.