Can GC members dump treasury to fund fees for their

transactions?

According to January GC minutes it would appear that they do make payments among themselves in hbar, eg the purchase of IP from Swirlds...now whether Swirlds dumps or holds those hbar is another question

This is kind of important stuff. If we are about to see some "step function" it could really mean nothing if the use case is made by GC member and they can use treasury to fund the fees +also get the portion for staking. Honestly I am struggling to understand Hedera's business model recently.

Presumably the purchase of Swirlds IP in Hbar is intended to be worth quite a bit more than dollar price with expected growth. But executed neither at top or bottom of market. The current intention is to do nothing that looks like manipulation or insider trading....what this means for business model is that no business decisions take hbar price trends into account. The total business model is oriented towards usage growth....and to be honest we haven't seen much of that for over a year....for Hbar holders the one positive indication is a slightly more liberal attitude towards marketing emerging at Hbar Foundation and Hedera itself. I think Hedera/hbar will have a much higher public profile by the end of the year

My point is that Hedera's business model heavily depends on HBAR price, which is essentially dictated by retail holders. HBAR price determines how many HBARs need to be sold for certain actions (e.g. patent purchase). So I have been always wondering how well was this thought-out. There is a big difference between HBAR being priced at 0.002 and 0.2. It directly affects the security/decentralization.

It's a fair point and certainly after further decentralization hbar price will be a key factor in network security...but right now it is not with all nodes being run by council. On a day-to-day level Hedera is the most secure platform in the space, but it's not decentralized by the crypto marketing definition of unlimited anonymous nodes , which raises an ancillary question about what the crypto model of decentralization is actually worth...effect of treasury use of hbar, the whole point is that it is not well thought out in regards to price. It is only well thought out in regard to legality and regulatory compliance expectations. I think we'll see positive price action once regulations are finalized both because of natural market choices and more public use cases...but that may still be years off...for now hbar moves with rest of market BTC pair price will remain stable...and my personal view still derives from reality that hodlers are parasites. Hedera's market, customers and community are those who buy its services. For currently imagined use cases Hedera transactions are under priced. Hedera prices are designed for a very different set of use cases, eg securing global money market transactions, securing governmental and corporate communications, securing communication between self driving vehicles...use cases with no room for error in need of public consensus for tps in the millions....I'm confident that hbar price will go up when/if such use cases come online...but that may be 10 years from now. In the meantime probably best trading move is to sell at next announcement and play meme coins....sorry for the length, just thinking out loud to your reasonable point which we've been debating for three years here with no resolution...but as noted above and in HBAR Foundation announcement, attitude towards marketing has loosened and we will see wider public awareness of Hedera this year

Its not going to be 10 years until huge transactions hit the network. We are talking months now until we see a change and V1 of the network. Holders are investors just like any other project. There is no difference between Hedera and others regarding investment and expectations.

10 years is a long time. Given this time and age, 10 years to get huge adoption is pretty slow.

I do expect the "step function" this year...a 10x increase in tps. But massive 1 million tps use cases are still a long way off...and yes I'm a little cynical about the speculative nature of "holding" tokens (of any project) with expectation of price appreciation. If tokens are digital commodities, then the holders are only buying with the expectation of demand...and the demand has to come from devs and their users who are the actual investors in technologies and platforms that use these digital commodities. Holders (like me)are just along for the ride

I don’t see why Hedera should be evaluated differently than other crypto. We should be equal to the top 5 now and 100 to 1000x of others at scale

I disagree. Someone like ServiceNow generating txns for every workflow state change of every customer of theirs could reasonably 10x current tps just from one use case. It's not a massively complex implementation for them and value add is immense. That's one use case of a recent joiner... Others have been at it for a while already. Founders are using terms like just around the corner and very soon and in a few months... Why would they risk credibility? They don't need to hype anything.

Scaling has to happen and that's what competition is only talking about, scaling & scaling and nothing else, while Hedera is on 10k TPS throttle for 4 years and no update in road map. If there is no higher TPS ceiling the enterprises will not build on and go elsewhere. Like with designing cities- you have ready infrastructure plumbing from beginning to take a load as the house are build and not wait till homes will be build to do the plumbing- it does not work that way.