I've been thinking about @alex-rourke's pitch for Hive as incentivized railways to Bitcoin, and when I discovered what Cardano and Polkadot were up to, I wondered if they had something as accessible to the masses as Distriator, Keychain, and V4V have to do that.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: what Cardano and Bitcoin Operating System is doing is interesting, though.
https://medium.com/tap-in-with-taptools/cardano-levels-up-bitcoin-with-smart-contracts-fbebe911ddf5
Cardano is now working with Bitcoin OS to create a bridge that will allow people to build decentralized applications that can access Bitcoin as easily as this can be done on Ethereum. The difference is that the demand for Bitcoin access is much higher than it is for Ethereum right now, so that if this catches on, Cardano should do very well toward the end of this run and be positioned well to get through the bear market in good shape and come out strong or the next bull run. But Cardano is the first of such coins, not the last. Bitcoin OS is looking to work with other coins and bridge the gap between altcoins’ greater capacity and Bitcoin.
This has more detail about exactly how Cardano and Bitcoin built their bridge, and does suggest that other coins can follow this path.
However, I realized today that Hive is so far in front of Cardano in terms of getting adopted by the masses through leveraging Bitcoin that frankly it is ridiculous. Look at what we already have a streamlined process to do using Keychain, V4V, and Distriator -- we literally can walk around and have businesses open to Bitcoin using HBD by just following the steps in this excellent guide.
@thedistriator/tips-for-successfully-approaching-and-onboarding-a-business-to-accept-hbd
San Francisco has some Bitcoin-accepting businesses ... this guide is so clear that I think even I could explain it ... I'm an investor and I'm not as good on the tech part, but still ... this guide puts it just that clearly. What we don't have here is a strong community of Hive users to make this sustainable starting from the consumer, and as of yet, USD is holding up well enough so that this would still be too many extra steps for most .. but then that 20-40 percent discount still makes for a competitive edge versus other places... it's potentially doable in the long run if Bitcoin adoption by businesses continues to increase here.
The issue for Hive is, are we getting into position to press the advantage we have? Is there a way to get into public notice as already ready? That leads to another question, too, relative to BItcoin OS ... but that is another post.