This post is just some musing on my part, about the scale required for a self-sustaining economy, and how far we may be from that, even with what we are seeing with the recent adoption of HBD in a single geographic region.
A Case Example
EconoQuesos is a small family-owned supermarket in Cumaná, Venezuela that started accepting HBD for payments in the beginning of May of this year. If you browse the Hive Sucre community, you will see many posts of users making purchases at the store. In 
@ramisey/me-uno-a-la-criptoadocion-esping
@hylene74/mis-compras-tienen-sello-hbd-esp-eng
@leidimarc/comprando-con-hbd-en-econoquesos-esp-eng
As awesome as this is, and adoption necessarily starts small, there will be a challenge in achieving the scale at which HBD adoption will actually be relevant to any of these businesses. As I have written about before, Cumaná is among the top cities in the world for active Hive users, and by far number 1 by penetration rate. In May, there was an estimated 500 active Hivers in the city, up from about 450 in March when I last examined it. Only one other city, Caracas (the capitol of Venezuela), has more Hivers, and not by much. Caracas is also a much larger city.
Yet even here, where we are at our densest and most successful in Hive and HBD adoption, we are still tiny. Fast, self-sustaining growth of a network usually happens at about 15% penetration rate. In Cumaná, we are at 0.12%. We need 100 times as many Hivers just in this city to get a self-sustaining network/economy going. That would be 54,000 active Hivers in one city alone.
A small supermarket like EconoQuesos likely achieves on the order of 1000-2000 transactions from customers per day, based on what I can find online for a typical grocery store. In the last 30 days, they have had 17 HBD transactions from 14 customers. Notably, 3 of those transactions were B2B - another HBD accepting local business. If the entire 500 or so Hivers in the city went and shopped there every day, it would probably represent less than half of their business. Realistically, most of those don't even live in the supermarket's catchment area. In order to match 10% of this one supermarkets business, the current activity would need to increase about 200 times over. That's for one supermarket, in one small city, in one country, but it would be a start.
Can We Achieve Adoption At Scale?
Is that achievable? Of course it is! Network and technological adoption has happened countless times already, although many more things fail than succeed. The point of this post is to show that it's going to take a substantial effort to achieve adoption at a meaningful scale, to the point where it could start to be self-perpetuating. We also have a financial incentive to make it happen. If Hive achieves scale - anywhere in the world, users who have Hive will benefit financially from that.
The 