Well, buried underneath all the Tattoo Academy stuff, you actually seem to have arrived at the distinction I've been making.

“Nobody needs to argue that every investment in a Hive-based project is automatically an investment in the Hive protocol itself. That would be a different claim entirely.”

Yes. Exactly.

And now you've quietly changed the claim from “investment in Hive” to “investment in the broader Hive ecosystem.”

Those are not automatically the same thing.

If you want to use “investment in Hive” as shorthand for “any investment in anything that exists somewhere in the Hive ecosystem,” you can define it that way. But that's your definition. It doesn't somehow follow from the fact that money or labor was spent.

And your definition has the exact problem you're accusing mine of having, it becomes self-sealing.

Build a game using Hive? Investment in Hive.

Build a wallet using Hive? Investment in Hive.

Build a business using Hive? Investment in Hive.

Spend money marketing your own product that happens to use Hive? Presumably investment in Hive too, because Hive might benefit.

At that point, what investment in a Hive-related project wouldn't qualify as an investment in Hive?

That's not a broader argument. It's just a broader definition.

The distinction I'm making is really not complicated: something can be part of an ecosystem, contribute to that ecosystem, and create value for that ecosystem without the resources spent on it becoming an investment in the ecosystem itself.

A shop in a shopping centre can make the shopping centre more attractive and bring in more visitors. The owner still invested in the shop, not in the shopping centre.

Steam benefits from games. WordPress benefits from plugins. Hive can benefit from wallets, games, businesses and services.

None of that is in dispute.

What is in dispute is your leap from “this project benefits Hive” or “this project is part of the Hive ecosystem” to “therefore the resources invested in this project were invested in Hive.”

You still haven't actually established that.

And the irony of spending several paragraphs mocking me for supposedly defining the conclusion into existence, while defining “Hive ecosystem” broadly enough that virtually anything touching Hive automatically counts as an investment in Hive, is difficult to miss.