I can see case and point about Hive being deflationary as you stated. I've thought about this myself but I'm unsure of when we will hit that point of where our blocks start to fill up and RC starts to become in demand. In one way a system could be made to loan out that RC which you could argue delegating hive power to an account is in fact that but I think there would be more to the system for tracking and rewarding those who do.
I've never really looking into it till now and haven't been able to locate it yet but is there a max block per 3 seconds on hive in terms of how much each can handle? Or can it simply be increased by witnesses offering up more power computers or a tweak in the code on one of the hard forks?
https://peakd.com/steemdev/@edicted/65-kb-max-length-post-keywords-javascript-steem-api
max block is 65KB
so we run the entire network on around 22KB per second
Witnesses can increase it but the more they do the more unstable and expensive the network becomes to run. We've never increased the block size in 6 years.
You made a point blocksize could be raised along with witness reward growing while Hive price rises. However this would only apply to top20 witnessess effectively making block producing more elite sport.
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
I know I used to.
But even my (+@sn0n +@rishi556) witness @hextech was breaking even when Hive was valued at like 20 cents. Now that Hive is valued over $1 the @hextech witness is generating a cash flow even though it's rank #37. We can already afford a full node. In fact we can afford to BUY a full node server (not rent on the AWS cloud).
There's also no rules about tweeking the system a little bit so witnesses outside the top 20 get a little bit more money than they do now. There are a lot of options and variables to consider.
You are absolutely right! I'd love to see 3 random witnessess choesen to confirm every block, it would rise rewards and improve security as well.