RE: HBD Crossed the 10% Threshold ... Play Stupid Games ... Win Stupid Prizes

"The 20% interest on HBD creates coins that don't do anything except push down the price of HIVE."

That is incorrect. One of the primary purposes of Hive is to enable investors to attain ROI. Prior to the increase in the return on HBD, almost the only overt way to attain to ROI was for holders of Hive to generate curation rewards. This created a financial purpose for curation that deprecated actual curative intent. Rather than upvote 'quality' posts - whatever quality standards consumers apply - investors upvoted posts to gain financial returns, which created incentive to form circlejerks, bot farms, to buy votes, to frontrun pandering, and for reasons related to curation reward metrics that have nothing to do with the quality of the content of the posts. A quick look at Trending, particularly during the heyday of bidbots, reveals that such financial incentives utterly derange curation and dramatically reduce the quality of content on Hive.

Implementing the 20% return on HBD enabled investors to achieve ROI without deranging curation, which has had a beneficial impact on content quality on the platform by reducing the use of staked Hive to curate only in order to gain curation rewards because that stake was instead parked in HBD. It also increased Hive's potential to attract investment by providing an ROI mechanism to investors other than dodgy curation rewards.

Social media has rapidly become the largest financial sector in global markets, and this shows that Hive's blog usecase has enormous potential for upside, far more potentially rewarding than any other use case.

The ratio of HBD to Hive is ~1/3 that at which the HBD 'haircut' is required to prevent debt from overwhelming the Hive currency value. We're nowhere close to that point today, and HBD continues to benefit free speech and content quality, which is arguably the platforms vastly greatest potential to raise token price, suppressed because attracting outside investment threatens extant control of governance, as Steem demonstrated (and BlackRock reveals is endemic to plutocracy).

@edicted has posted several times regarding stable coins and shown that HBD FUD is baseless. I recommend having a look at those posts and considering the analysis he has provided, as well as understanding how ROI is facilitated and curation rewards are mitigated by HBD interest. The quoted statement reveals you completely ignore those, and other, benefits of nominal HBD interest.

HBD savings, for example, increase funds available to invest in development. People take out loans for reasons, and without debt the world would be without one of the most powerful vehicles for commercial development. Hive could certainly invest better than it does, but that requires better use of funds, rather than reducing funds available for development.