I think you're still arguing past the point I'm making.

Nobody is disputing that spending years of work and substantial capital on something is an investment. The disagreement is over what that investment is in.

If I spend $100k building a game and release it on Steam, I've invested $100k in the game. Steam may benefit from it, maybe quite a lot. More users, more activity, more revenue, a stronger ecosystem. But that doesn't make the $100k an investment in Steam.

Same with WordPress. A plugin, a theme, or a successful site can add a lot of value to WordPress. That still doesn't mean the time and money spent building it was invested in WordPress.

And that's the point of those examples. They're not the argument themselves, they're illustrating the argument.

An investment in X is not automatically an investment in Y just because X uses Y or benefits Y.

Hive is no different.

You can build something on Hive that brings users, activity, visibility, utility, and value to Hive. Of course that benefits the ecosystem. I'm not denying that.

What I'm denying is the next step: that because Hive benefited, your investment in the project therefore becomes an investment in Hive.

In my view, it doesn't.

If you buy Hive stake, that's an investment in Hive. If you put resources into the infrastructure or systems that actually run and maintain Hive, that's an investment in Hive. Those are pretty uncontroversially investments in the thing itself.

But if you invest in a business, app, game, community, or other project that happens to use Hive, then you've invested in that project.

Hive benefiting from it doesn't change what the investment was in.

So when you frame the question as “does spending years and capital building within the ecosystem count as investing in the ecosystem?”, you're basically building your conclusion into the question.

That's the disagreement. Repeating your definition of “investment in Hive” doesn't actually answer it.

And so far, I still haven't seen an argument for that jump. You've mostly restated the conclusion and, from the start, mixed in ad hominems about me instead of dealing with the distinction I'm making.

If you think an investment in something that uses Hive is therefore also an investment in Hive, then make that argument.