Hive IS much cheaper to run than other chains designed to hold large amounts of data.
There has been a huge amount of work on optimising this by @blocktrades and others and costs have been reduced by more than an order of magnitude.
Whereas once Steem required massively expensive 1Tb RAM servers now a basic 64GB RAM machine with cheap SSD will run Hive RPC nodes and witnesses can be run on much less.
A single 64Gb API node costing around $2000 could handle all Hive's current traffic (according to @blocktrades). We have immense spare capacity.
Look at the requirements for being an EOS witness and you'll see how far ahead Hive is in this department.
Oh yeah there is no denying how much work has gone into Hive scaling up.
It's pretty incredible really.
But that doesn't really matter.
We are going to hit a brick wall no matter how fast we hit the ground running.
I look forward to the live stress-test at the end of the year.
Here hoping to good problems like millions of new users and order of magnitude transaction increases.