Hey, @practicalthought.

re: Smart contracts

I'm wondering if Neoxian would actually do something like that. He gives out loans, that I know, but I wonder if he might also do some kind of exchanging on a limited basis. At any rate, being able to have a plethora of smart contracts to peruse for a straight fiat to HIVE transaction sounds like as an option as any to me, as bouncing from one exchange to another and potentially back out again is just inefficient, and frankly, it's just dumb. Any regulations notwithstanding, I am with you 100% that if we're going to mainstream any of this crypto, there needs to be a brain dead simple way of getting in and out of it.

re: Steemworld

We don't know who ported Steemworld over. And from what I know, it's not an easy task to do, because unless he finally did put it all up on github (as we was proposing to do before the whole mess on SPS got started where only a few projects were getting funded, and others were in one day out the next thanks to the voting procedure and GTG's threshold proposal constantly moving around), it's mostly his own work, with a lot of his own connections and so forth. So, if it wasn't him who did it (even with all the turmoil), whoever did it wasn't just copying someone's website code.

That said, I'm in agreement that we should find a way to compensate him for its use.

re: STEEM and Sun

I might fall into the category of those who aren't quite ready to give up on STEEM. I am in the middle of a powerdown, but my intent, for now is to bring over only what I have invested in STEEM, and leave what I actually earned there to continue with some limited posting, curating and publishing.

No, it's not decentralized (especially the way the witnesses have been since after the softfork), and yes, there's the possibility that it will all be swallowed up in TRON at some point, but if there is still an opportunity to earn STEEM which can later be turned into HIVE, I don't mind trying to earn on two different platforms.

As it is, we're still only four weeks into HIVE's existence, and so we still don't know exactly where it will be going. It's been a while since the last hiveio post, so who knows where we're at or what's going on. I don't foray into Discord either. It's always bedlam there and it can take days, if ever, for me to get answers on any of the servers I've tried. So, counterproductive.