I agree that liquidity is HIVE's biggest problem right now and should be one of the main focuses of the community. It will take much more than just the internal HIVE/HBD market. Bittrex, for example - the only serious HIVE exchange for US customers - has had their wallets down forever and I don't know if they're ever coming back, so that's out, and the liquidity there was never great anyway. Even if people wanted to invest in HIVE, it's too hard to get in, and too uncertain if you'll be able to get out.
I know from experience as I just went through a very difficult experience purchasing large quantities of HIVE for the @steemmonsters account, and we would have purchased even more had we been able to.
Yeah I mean sure if you have BTC and you want Hive you can't just get infinite liquidity from the internal market pair.
I still feel like the internal market should act as a core.
Like if we can get HBD/USDT pair on exchanges.
It becomes much easier for liquidity to appear via guaranteed arbitrage.
Much easier to get an HBD listing when the internal market liquidity goes x1000.