I think Hive is best positioned to be the economic and monetary platform for a "virtual country" - a country with no territory but with a people, the Hiveans, brought together by the will to create new value, common prosperity and do good.
As a financial platform, Hive can provide the "central bank" function of a country and undergird its economy.
New value, which will bring sustainable value to the currency and encourage exchanges with the outside world, will be created by the many possible applications:
- creating and spreading knowledge - Hive can support journals, a "Quora-like" application, a "Medium-like application"
- contracting - like back in the time of Utopian
- charitable giving and crowdfunding - like back in the time Fundition
- distributed storage (I sketched out a "Storj-" or "Filecoin-like" application called Steembit in an older article)
- personal archiving / customer service application (I wrote about this in "My blockchain memory")
AND of course - games (Splinterlands, Exile game, dCity, etc)
I would all the community around the blockchain and its applications, around this "virtual country" the Hive Republic
RE: A soul, an ideal