It's somehow disheartening to hear an argument like "yeah, but they are not real money" related to cryptocurrency from skeptics, when the majority of money spending and transfers are now online, when crypto is a talking point of the Biden-Trump debates (and Trump goes to a crypto conference), when the biggest asset manager in the world is deeply involved in the space and the majority of Fortune 500 companies has or will have onchain projects.
And yet, crypto still seeks recognition in the real world. It is the future, but not yet the present, at least not enough. Yes, of all coins, Bitcoin has a brand of its own and sometimes it is used interchangeably with "crypto" by people who are not familiar with the space.
I'm not sure how many of the bitcoiners think of it as "money" and how many only as an asset to hold that increases in value over time. The argument on the proponents of bitcoin as "money" is that it will become one when prices will be set in bitcoin and not in USD. There is the counter-argument that the fixed nature of the bitcoin supply doesn't help sustain the elasticity of the economy, to which they usually reply that it would solve the problem of inflation. We'll see how this goes...
Where I wanted to reach was that even bitcoin still needs to fight every step of the way, for every small or big victory. To some degree, its victories are wins for the entire space, but in many cases each ecosystem and project has a fight to fight.
The best counter-argument to "yeah, but they are not real money" is to show them cases where it acts as real money. But there is a catch. When to use it in the real economy you need to convert it to fiat money, the skeptics still have something to cling on and accept that certain coins have real value.
One way to clear (some) doubts is to "throw money" at the world in a way that places the spender in a favorable light. This way you show that the "money is real" and can sustain a big(ger) project in the real world, that can be seen, touched, used, enjoyed, etc. Sometimes the marketing is not for the masses, but for potential investors.
Consider the Hive-funded rally car. I've looked at it as a way to market to the masses for a long time. As such, it is a poor way to spend money when there are other cheaper advertising methods that would likely have better results. And I've seen other people express discontent about this potentially unjustified spending.
What if...? What if the main target of this advertising is not the masses, the public, but the rich people around these cars (not as in F1, but still someone funds all these cars and drivers, many at a higher class than the Hive-funded car)? You never know who would like to drop 100k in buying HIVE. The question is how will they get it because, well, we aren't so easy to reach by big money...
I still don't know if the cost is justified or not, I've seen other sponsors started to show up on the car (@pfunk is one of them), so they are probably thinking how to reduce costs for Hive while keeping the car going.
There are other areas where if we do the math as accountants Hive is throwing money out the window. In some cases, it might be true, so it's important to see both pros and cons, but in other cases the end goal might be higher than number of new users but the talent of new users or a certain use case that is desired to be incentivized.
For example, like others, I also thought after a while that the prizes + votes that go to the VIBES community every week are kind of high. The question is, would the new users who come through this contest stick around without the incentives? I don't know, but I do know that most people love music, and having this kind of content tied to Hive on X and Hive helps.
When we do exact calculations, some things won't make sense. Interestingly, if we would be able to use HBD to pay for a concert ticket, I doubt we would calculate the return on that HBD. Sure, we might gauge the effectiveness of that spending after seeing if we enjoyed or not the concert. But not everything can be judged in terms of ROI. For example, the boreholes in Ghana.
Yes, we can analyze if we can afford this or that spending or if we can afford it at a certain time, that makes sense to put under the microscope sometimes.
We often complain that Hive is ignored, shadowbanned, etc. Maybe the solution is not to complain, and do what everyone else does: pay, if it's worth it.