One of my "biggest fears" for Hive is when the eye of mass attention turns our way, the infrastructure won't scale and will buckle under pressure. With the explosion of Splinterlands over the last month, we saw how this could affect the user experience of others on Hive, as playing bots inundating the system - that issue has been put to rest and as a result, the platform is working smoothly and the load is low - however for a better look at what is going on, 
While I don't honestly know whether the volume of traffic to truly test the system will ever arrive, but I diligently work and openly hope that it will. There is so much to love here as a user, investor and developer, but there is more to it than that. I am one of those idealistic people who believes that we have an opportunity to be part of changing the world for the better.
In order to be part of that, we need to be part of the conversation and as a platform built for tokenized content distribution, this should be one of our core competencies. Perhaps one day, it will shine and become the home of crypto it could be, rather than the shite that is Twitter.
However, I don't even know if that is possible, given the number of accounts we have available - If 20 million people decided to join today, what would happen? I am guessing they are not going to, so I don't have to calm my breath yet - but it would definitely create a little havoc around the traps and mine aren't going to stretch too far.
However, what would be interesting in combination with 
Resource Credits are a good one for this, as they are only created based on powered up stake, meaning in order to pool it, an equivalent amount of stake has to be locked away. HIVE POWER already attracts an interest yield which is far better than a bank, plus it also carries the possibility for curation return of around 10.5% APR, so adding another yield benefit onto holding HP can only be a good thing to encourage taking HIVE off of exchanges and staking.
For those who don't know or remember, Resource Credits (RCs) are assets that allow accounts to perform operations on the Hive blockchain and transact. Different actions carry different costs in credits, but these credits don't have a value themselves and, they do not have any access to the rewards pool. This means that once they can be delegated, an account can be created, hold zero HIVE POWER and still transact freely, as long as they have some RCs available.
For example, most normal users probably need 50 to 100 HP to have full access and not run out of RCs (which replenish similarly to voting power) My account has 267,000 HP, which means if I give accounts 50 HP worth of RCs, my single account can power about 5300 accounts.
That doesn't sound like much, does it? However, because RCs do not have voting rights or carry economic value directly, they are the type of asset that can be delegated and undelegated as needed (if a system exists for this) without needing to delegate a single HP. What this means is my voting power can remain intact, while all of my spare Resource credits can go out to empower new users and applications that require a lot of transactions. They will be able to assign an account some from the pool when the account needs them and, unassign when the account doesn't, reassigning them immediately to another account if required.
With the RC delegation pools, I wouldn't need to handle any of my RCs myself, it would be like an Automatic Market Maker (AMM) that matches "sellers" and "buyers" - supply and demand. With value generated being able to be distributed back to the LPs based on stake.
Now, for a game like Splinterlands that is transaction intensive, this could mean that they could redesign and still scale, with something like their own rental market fees having a small percentage fed to LPs who provide RCs. I am not sure how they are handling this now, but I know they have a fair stake themselves, but if things go very well, they might have a few million new users coming into their game and, 10x that in bots wanting a piece of the pie.
As I said above, I think Hive has the potential to be part of changing the global economy and one of those things is having a community that is incentivized to work together, rather than compete against each other - a rising tide lifts all boats scenario. RCs are one of those areas that it is possible to use to further connect user stake and empower the greater community, spreading value across the entire network, as well as risk.
Oh, and while RCs do not have access to the pool, they can actually directly create value and in fact, they can create new assets. RCs are what is needed to "buy" and create the account tokens above and it takes (I think) about 5000 HP to be able to create on every five days. I can create (price in RCs fluctuates on demand) about 50 every five days and Ihave been collecting a while. Nothing stops them being able to create other kinds of digital assets too.
Now, this doesn't have much to do with scalability of the infrastructure, but what I am hoping is that in time, there will be increasing ways to use HIVE POWER to enable users, as well as attract value to accounts, making staking even more of a no-brainer decision. The more trickles of income the better and Hive is the (almost) original DeFi platform, offering yields of various kinds based on stake.
A lot of people want the millions of people here now, but don't think that much about what that actually means. It would be brilliant if when the masses do arrive, they will find a thriving community that is at the core of the token economy discussion and they will want to add their voice too - but that requires doing the math now and making sure that they will all have a place to call home.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]