I'm also a big fan of game theory in crypto.

But I think that in general, approaches which aim to restrict the supply of a coin (such as lock-up periods for coins or incentives to power up) are only useful in the short term. They are good for bootstrapping a coin at inception but once a coin has reached some level of maturity they just result in volatility. Any rise in the price of the coin will (fairly swiftly) be met with power-downs and an increased supply of the coin. The dam breaks and the price falls again.

Mature coins should instead focus on increasing demand for the coin. For Hive I think that means more uses for the coin and increasing the size of the community (easy huh!).

If you were to ask Hive hodlers what they currently do with their coins, most of them are probably going to say that they use it to take part in the content creation economy, either as curator or creator. Some will say that they just hold the coins as an investment in Hive for the future and don't really do anything with them. And this works. It's always important to remember that Hive has been successful where so many web3 social media efforts have already been and gone.

But if you are just a casual social media user who posts or comments infrequently and does not actively curate (as I think most people are) is there any active reason to own Hive (aside from the minimum level necessary)? There needs to be more. And that's an article in itself.

tl;dr:
Increase the reasons to buy Hive rather than restricting the right to sell Hive.