Oh, I'm glad I got out of public-listed corpo-world that was my last employer. They were doing a big joint venture, and it was either join, or take a package, so I took the package. My wife's income covers all our basic expenses, we want for nothing, and any job I do get in the future will just be to buy toys like computers, or to travel a bit before we are in a position to retire (as early as possible).

The thing about chains, and life, and what we choose to do is simple - by choosing to focus on one thing, we are actively choose to ignore, or neglect another opportunity. Time is our only finite resource. (Well, other than all the things that Eart gives us.)

In regards to the DAO - I would love to support short term projects and proposals that are written like traditional grants, each assesed on their own merit. eg, if I was applying for DAO funding for something, (perhaps working on a new body of photographic art work with the view to exhibit in a physical space) - being able to fund things like a) The Model's time, b) Wardrobe / Costume c) Setting up a web store that can ship prints worldwide (paid for in hive / hbd etc) d) A big old sequence of blog posts documenting the entire creative process

Sort of like an artist in residence, but it is entirely enabled to be decentralised, and eternally documented on hive. It is something that doesn't directly benefit hive in terms of software dev, networking, conferences or whatever, but when I spun up a witness node last week (Several years too late, probably):

My core belief is that content can bring value to HIVE. That we are a place where compelling human stories can be told without censorship, and reach a wide audience. My belief is that creatives will create things because they are compelled to do so

That, and of course, distribution and decentralisation - by that, I mean witness nodes in people's houses (like mine) which make the network far, far more robust when compared to having nodes geographically concentrated in data centres running on leased hardware that people don't own.

The DHF may have a lot of waste as far as many people are concerned - but I think we need to be more targeted at onboarding. I know everyone forever and always says this, but I was looking at Brave ads the other week, and it seems cheap. Whether or not there's a conversion from ads to real users... that's another story.

How can Hive's user base grow to be an explosive, viral platform the likes of tik-tok, reddit, x, etc?

For me it always comes back to the content. No one ever talks about the technology behind those other platforms. They talk about the trends their users set. Those trends always come from content.