First, the value of HBD is derived from the price of HBD. It a derivative.

Yes. There are a few people who are making a huge passive income. But by paying 20% on a derivative, HIVE is repeating the fiascos of Enron, Mortgage Backed Securities and other financial fiascos.

The justification for this is that a few whales believe that it will improve HIVE's position on centralized exchanges.

This courtship of centralized exchanges creates dependencies that undermine HIVE's status as a decentralized exchange.

We are making strides towards the ecosystem building out more.

If this was true then we would have seen a huge influx of users. The data shows a steady decline of users.

We have seen a collapse of coins on Hive Engine. If you followed the transactions on Honey.Swap you would see that users stopped putting their HBD earnings in HE and put them in HBD savings. This accelerated the decline of the HE coins.

Which matters more to the long term success of HIVE: The success of HIVE-Engine or HIVE's inclusion in centralized exchanges?

Even if HIVE got better play on centralized exchanges, it will never be more than an also ran on the platform.

Some of the benefits not mentioned are the fact that this allowed more economic activity to bridge back and forth from the Binance Smart Chain through CubDefi.

I know that you don't mind being a cuckold, but I would prefer to see HIVE maintaining its independence than serving as a whipping boy for Binance, Bittrex or the other centralized exchanges.

Seriously, does Binance care more about BUSD, its own stablecoin, or its brief dalliance with HBD?

I would prefer to see HIVE establish itself as an alpha-blockchain than to see it devolve into some beta-blockchain that has to bend over and pay 20% on a stablecoin to get attention.