This is a comment I made in response to a gentleman in a thread where he called Hive a pyramid scheme. I think it deserves to be made into a post.
Most HIVE is not held or even bought by any active participants on this platform. It's not even powered up. Out of the entire virtual supply of about 379 million HIVE, the vesting fund makes up only about 137 million HIVE. There exists about 200 million liquid HIVE. About a half of that massive amount of liquid HIVE is on exchanges. The use case of those tokens is to serve as vehicles of speculative trading against Bitcoin for the purposes of growing one's Bitcoin stack. That is the highest value use case of HIVE or, in actual fact, of nearly all other altcoins as well.
Hive is a system that transfers value from altcoin speculators who are trying to grow their Bitcoin positions to recipients of HIVE inflation in one form or another, be it author rewards, curation rewards, witness rewards or whatever. Said altcoin speculators are the "victims" here, not the newbies or anyone posting to Hive and getting the rewards while growing their stake without necessarily or usually buying a single coin.
In fact, I'm beginning to think the real scammers are the people who are active on Hive while screeching it's a pyramid scheme thus scaring off newbies who might become their competitors in the game of amassing tokens that an entirely separate group of people, speculative traders who never power up their coins, gives value to. That's because too many of those people appear far too intelligent not to understand what I just wrote in this and many other comments.