Great write up here man! Much appreciated you putting into far more digestible wording than I can muster in my posts! The HSC project while still in the very, very, early stages of development is moving forwards. I've just this morning gotten in contact with my future development partner Joop and it sounds like he's quite excited to get diving into the reverse engineering side of things.

@LaPingvino and @KLYE are both decently seasoned developers and witnesses here on HIVE, both bringing different programming language specializations and differing education backgrounds into the HSC dev duo. We'll both be working on it part time here initially with an emphasis on building out our knowledge of the future build architecture and catching up on any technicals research that needs be done up until the team can secure more funding to pay one if not both of us full time wages for HSC project development.

His realistic request in regards to development payment was that I help him out with his living expenses and shelter, which I deem more than fair given he's going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the HSC project in regards to helping me reverse engineer the Ethereum implementation we're going to be heavily modifying in order to not only accept HIVE tokens as it's base currency but also be able to accept and manage other token types like HE tokens or in the future SMT based tokens or maybe even some integration down the road with more exotic sidechains on HIVE like DLUX..

Ultimately the point I'm trying to make here and one of the key development mantras moving forwards on this HSC project is that inclusiveness of other sidechains not only helps leverages their functions but also supports the ecosystem as a whole, rather than competing amongst ourselves as which often happens when people are living in a scarcity mindset. Ease of use and availability to anyone who wants to use the sidechain and has HIVE along with being made intuitive and extremely cost efficient compared to chains offering similar functionality is a must and will be something kept in mind during the build.

The HSC project looks to bring an enhanced level of cryptocurrency functionality to HIVE. Once developed and the genesis block is crafted kicking off block mining the HIVE chain will begin to enter the "post-scarcity" phase of its existence. With proper implementation of the HSC and some clever marketing HIVE could very well contend for a top 10 market cap position given it will be able to provide the same functionality a lot of the top ranked coins possess at a fraction of the price.

The HSC enhanced HIVE blockchain not only will offer a user a potentially far more fulfilling experience than using a similarly featured but more expensive EVM chain, but the entirety of our community be leveled up with a new catalyst for potential, leading to highly sought out smart contract based dApps being built and running on a chain that uses OUR currency as it's base currency and pays OUR people to decentralize it.

The entire community as a whole will benefit from the implementation of the HSC running alongside and utilizing HIVE as its base currency. There isn't any other outcome.

Given the very relevant market demand for affordable EVM chain currently in the crypto ecosystem the demand for the HIVE token may end up far exceeding it's current and future inflation rates as users from more expensive EVM capable chains flock to HIVE to take advantage of cheaper decentralized smart contracts similar to how ETH users flocked to the centralized BnB chain because it was cheaper..

I'll be making up a proposal and submitting it to the DHF outlining the development costs of this EVM sidechain in hopes to secure a more realistic development funding amount for my dev partner and myself. Given the amount of work to get Hive.Loans built and working without it running on the HSC to ensure the Mid April release date is met falls on me and within the original Proposal #154 outline, but leaves little budget to pay @LaPingvino...

So a secondary "add-on" proposal will have to get made up in order to facilitate bringing him on board and likely extending development payouts past Mid April on the HSC development side of things. Hoping to have a testnet HSC running by mid April but not going to rush putting it live until it's been well tested by multiple rounds of closed alpha testers. While it might have been possible for me to do all this development work myself the time overall to launch would grow substantially, and with something like this a quick build, test and deployment cycle is critical.

The way the gas fees are utilized is something that will be tweaked in testing to see exactly where the optimal level is, but it's my thought that by sending a percentage of the HIVE gas fees on HSC to @null or burning them might be an effective tool against inflation. Some percentage of the HiveGas (maybe we'll refer to it as Honey just for fun in reference) gets burnt to combat inflation, majority of the Honey goes to the miners and a sustainable percentage (say 5% to 15%) gets paid out to a developer fund which exists to help pay for future research and development of HSC as well as pay the core team for future work. Of course these are merely ideas at this point but the HSC will ultimately be set up so it's sustainable, cost effective compared to competitors and in easily accessible to users, developers and future block miners here within the Hive community.

There isn't going to be any proprietary HSC exclusive token as we're running on HIVE for a base currency so ensuring that the chain pays for its own future development is imperative in order to avoid the hassle of trying to rally funding from the community every time you want to implement new features or update things in the project.

Anyways, Sorry for the massive fucking wall of text. More intimate details of how this all works and what the plan to have it funded, built and tested looks like will be coming in a proposal in the near future.

Thanks again @taskmaster4450 for the wonderful write up and for spreading the word about otherwise potentially unknown upcoming game changers to HIVE.