My current understanding matches what smooth is saying but I think it is actually relevant for practice. Only that the pressure does not come from HIVE powerdowns but from soliciting extra traffic LeoThreads style. Do not get me wrong, that's a legitimate usecase. However, I feel like overtransacting drains the resources making future transactions more expensive, limiting the expansion in a similar way. So in practice, the scenario happens (although for different reasons).
Kind of similar to the following claim:
It is important to take notice that real world operations went in the exact opposite direction as many theorize. Aren't we told that people will convert HBD when the price of $HIVE is low and then convert it back when price moons, creating a point of vulnerability? To put it another way, the threat is that a huge amount of HBD is created when the market runs and then, when the price drops, tons of $HIVE will be created.
We have to prepare for this possibility and work to prevent all potential points of attack to the ecosystem.
Yet here the exact opposite happened. The conversion took place at a level where many of us feel $HIVE is cheap. What happens when $20 million wants to get into savings and take advantage of the outstanding return provided by Hive's stablecoin?
The big oversight here is that people "theorize" in ceteris paribus environment. HBD has recently sufferred a huge regulatory shock (witnesses setting APR to 20 from near zero). From inside of Hive, this feels an overstatement but it is really not if watching from distance. So HBD is still being created to adjust to the shock and the HIVE price reaction happens an order of magnitude (or two) below the surface.
Where will 20 million HBD come from?
This is why we can expect months in the future to reflect this.
I can see 20M coming out of the bush but what about 200M? HBD is essentially a business loan. Business loans money in order to create profit. Does extra 200M HBD (in savings or circulation) provide Hive blockchain with more value-creating opportunities? Getting extra users surely does. Getting a few whales to deposit 1M HBD into savings does not (IMO). And what if you want to print 2B HBD? To start with, you have to do it around a business of a comparable size.