>Witnesses can be anonymous

They aren't though. A few are pseudonymous, but most are known persons absolutely reachable by the US government. In fact, of the top 20 witnesses, a total of maybe 1 is actually anonymous, and there is a reason for this. Witnesses in Hive are trusted persons, not trusted in the sense of custodians, but they are the equivalent of mining pools in Bitcoin, also run by trusted, known individuals. It is much harder to establish a reputation of trustworthiness alongside a sense of accountability for someone who is not a known person.

Yes it will be hard for the US to shut down Hive due to decentralization, but at this stage, as small as we are, not that hard yet. It will be vastly harder for them if we manage to avoid their notice now, make an easy change to avoid this problem, continue to grow unabated, and let them only realize our relevance when Hive is something that's on everyone's smartphone and so attacking Hive is attacking the general public.

I think you underestimate how much value has been added recently by the work to stabilize HBD. There is at least 8 million less Hive in circulation thanks to stabilization in recent months.

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>By the way, HBD is worth $1 of hive and not a dollar.

I know, but by the definition in the bill, that still qualifies as a fiat-based stablecoin. It doesn't have to be collateralized by USD, it can still qualify if it is "pegged" or "tied" to USD, regardless of how it is collateralized. HBD central premise is that it is pegged to USD.

>maybe the next the bitcoin will become illegal too.
I also agree with this, and perhaps Bitcoin is large enough to fight the state and win. Hive as of now, is very much not large enough to beat the state in legal battles which are primarily about resources.

Yeah there is merit to that. Technically it's not that much simpler (defining and pricing an index is not a complicated thing), but conceptually it is simpler and it's an easy story to sell to users. The trade off is that silver is still a speculative commodity on its own, prone to large swings in price.

Pricing network debt in silver is a systemic risk, what if silver takes off in price?

Losing potential upsides of having stablecoin within the ecosystem?

That's likely not as simple as it sounds, destroys an enormous amount of value, and may cause an enormous amount of inflation. If it's done without compensating HBD holders, there would still be those prior risks, but the main damage would be to the integrity of the system (it would be like Bitcoin miners forking to neutralize a huge amount of bitcoin).

Aside from the inherent value of having a stablecoin, the mechanics of HBD work to remove Hive from supply, creating price pressure on Hive (removing over 8 million hive in the last few months alone). That will no longer exist if we remove HBD entirely.

I think they are going with the attitude that stablecoins are equivalent to counterfeit dollars. Given that the average age of a congressperson is 58, and the average age of a senator is 63, it is not surprising that they cannot understand or relate to something new like stablecoins (and the diversity of approaches within that category).

The options to keep a value stable HBD - Hive Based Denomination - are myriad. While pegging to Tether or any other coin that is non-fiat might be a ~legal stop gap I think a consumer price index would be an even better step if we can agree to such. Then it doesn't matter what inflation is, or how many dollars get printed in 2022... We still need to be careful about issuing debt and all the other economics we've talked about here. Now that we've established a relatively decent pegging it's hard to argue we should get rid of it. The DHF to savings to the general attack on stable coins in general all show that this paradigm is needed and valuable. 

We don't have to get it right, we just have to get it better. The real beauty here is the governance, our ability to fork / upgrade is way ahead of it's counterparts both in and out of crypto.

Witnesses on Hive are known personalities. Hive also has major businesses in the US. They will almost certainly be the target of prosecution if we ignore the rule. HBD will also be delisted from Bittrex.

Ignoring the problem is not a good solution, although it is true that prosecutors will like pursue TetherUSD et al long before they go after Hive witnesses.

This is a [hive-archeology](https://github.com/pibara/hive-archeology) proxy comment meant as a proxy for upvoting good content that is past it's initial pay-out window.

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