You make a good point about Hive power being the weaker option between the two, and this is something that's crucial to figure out. Why power up Hive and work at curating for approx. 12%, locking it up for 13 weeks, when you can get 20% in HBD, mitigate the volatility and unlock it in a fraction of the time?

Why Power up Hive? should be the question on all of our minds if we want this chain to be prosperous. Right now the only real reason is for RC, but the delegation system has made that abundant resource even easier to get. RC will play a significant role if we attract a large user base though, since RC is based on network bandwidth. Having thousands of people power up Hive to transact is better than having a few people power up thousands of Hive.

Do people care enough to spend thousands of dollars on Hive just for governance? No, by and large they really don't.

Are staking rewards going to set us apart from other opportunities in the crypto charts? Not at all, especially when the power down is 13 weeks.

So far the best utility for powering up Hive seems to be RC, and if we want that to have an effect we really need to empower outside developers on this chain. I've mentioned before that we need good documentation and work on the libraries. The fact that this isn't one of the top priorities makes me wonder if either I'm working with bad devs, there are higher priorities that I can't fathom, or there's a nefarious plot by the good-ole-boy club to keep outsiders away from the chain. We need documentation and libraries on par with Discord, so easy even a non-dev like me can write a bot and deploy it. Until that happens, enjoy being irrelevant.

On a final note, I've kept quiet about the HBD interest because 1.) People seem to really like the idea and 2.) I know enough about tokenomics to know I don't know shit about tokenomics. I have kept my rate at 10% and never moved it because the 20% seems too high, but that's only based on a gut feeling and nothing more. I don't want to over-leverage Hive, and magically printing money that is backed by Hive seems like a good way to do that. Does that mean 10% is safe? No, but it's safer IMO.

P.S. Hive blog rewards should be eliminated completely.