I saw a long comment from 
When someone stakes tokens in order to upvote, that doesn't cost them money. All they're doing is transferring value from their bank account to their Hive account. They're still in possession of their money and with that property they can support, for free.
Entire comment
Now, Mr Lefttouse is astute and as adept at explaining concepts as any of the best out there, and the nuance in this is fantastic.
Do you see the beauty of Hive?
This is all about value transfer and for someone buying HIVE with fiat, they are transferring the value from one currency that they don't own, into a tool that they do. They aren't losing the value in this transfer, they are just converting it into another form and a form that means they can
The "spending" is of course through staking and those vests having access to the newly minted pool of tokens that get distributed through various mechanisms. But, if a person chooses not to continue on this path, they have the option to power it down again (yes, it takes 13 weeks) and convert it back into something else of value, or use it to buy some Splinterlands cards and rent them out, or something else...
However, it is of course valued by market dynamics, which means it could be either higher or lower than the starting fiat value. It is the "lower" that people fear of course.
However, what is also interesting in this is that if a person was to support an artist, as well as other artists who are in the Hive community in this way, the value they would be providing through the stake draw on the pool, would be distributed in HIVE or HBD, which means that there is a "higher or lower" factor in there also. This means that the artist could sell for fiat example today and get market prices at the 45 cent mark, or hold on to it for the next bullrun and have the tokens earned today, valued at magnitudes more.
For example, every 5% vote I give on a comment works out to about 20 cents, where I get 10 cents worth in HIVE POWER and the author gets 10 cents generally split between HIVE POWER and HBD. However, that is at 45 cents. If we say that after 10 comments in the week the person has earned a dollar worth of votes at 45 cents, if they sold down the track when the price is $2.50, those ten comments earned $5.50 worth of value. That might not sound like much, but it adds up. Not only that, if it takes two years to get to that price and only the HIVE POWER was held, it would have increased by about 20% in volume that time through curation. That means those 10 comments earned almost $7.
That is not too bad, but few have the patience for it.
However, what should be remembered along that way, was that was literally about 2.5 HIVE worth of comment votes, but that 20% extra would also mean that the same amount would have been going to other people in the community. Other artists perhaps. If a person has 100K fans that bought 5 HIVE each (~2.50 worth) they would literally have a whale vote of 11 dollars a day currently - but the entire group would be pushing out 110 dollars worth of votes, if voting 10x a day.
That is a bit of support for artists around the world.
And then of course, if this was what people started doing, the value of HIVE would start to increase alongside the activity, meaning that the people who converted fiat value into HIVE value, would likely see their value grow quite nicely, including the value they are distributing to the content they love.
Well, if you really want to support struggling artists, Hive is the place to do it, because it is a growing ecosystem with many other aspects that factor into the value of the blockchain. Rather than just relying on creator attention for value, Hive also has other reasons for people to use and buy HIVE, as well as stake it. This means that there is spread of usecase on the individual token, so while one person is using it to upvote art content, another is using it to stake on Polycub for a yield return. And, yes, this adds value to the staked users voting too, because with less stake in the pool, the more power their vote has.
Essentially - it is shortsightedness.
People want what they want now and most people are not keen to participate in the long process of building the mechanisms. This is the same for most content creators on Hive too, who think that dumping their work here is "adding value" even though they do very little to ensure that what they offer actually has value for their audience.
But, all that could change in a near instant with a little bit of chanced publicity of some kind, which could see a million people join in a week with 10K of them spending a couple hundred dollars on some HIVE, just to give it a go.
Pipedream?
I don't think so - but it isn't likely to happen too soon. However, the world economy is changing, as is the employment market and the way people live their lives in general. Digitalization is in full swing, but up until now the value of it has been largely exploited by a handful of companies. We are approaching a tipping point though, where more people are looking to capitalize on their activity for their own value expansion, rather than just being milked of value like cows.
And, the other factor that is going to come into it is the ownership of content, experience, transaction data and a little bit of digital space to call our own. It seems like a fad at the moment, but NFTs and tokenized social networks are going to be very mainstream soon enough, just as all of the gadgets and things you use daily now, were a decade or two ago.
Hive offers both of these things in a handy little platform with a base token that provides ownership as well as earning potential rolled into one. Conveniently, that same token also makes up the protection mechanisms through decentralization, provides for governance decisions and can act like any currency, except it can be anywhere on the network in three seconds for free.
I just don't get why people don't see this - but then, most are just interested in what they can get out of a situation, not what they can put in, even if what is put in still benefits them directly and gives them something out. But, all of these little interactions and transactions on Hive add up over time to create a pretty impressive ecosystem. It is like dabs of paint mixed on a palette and applied to a canvas one tiny stroke at a time, to create a masterpiece.
Perhaps being on Hive is a creative artform of its own.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
