When you're new to Hive, there are a lot of terms you’ll hear thrown around. It can be confusing to distinguish between Hive, Hive Power and Hive Based Dollar, so here's a guide to explain the differences.
Hive
Hive is the cryptocurrency that many use for transactions and powering up. The price can fluctuate depending on the market, so it's always good to be aware of this before buying or selling. You can put it into savings, but the percentage you earn is small and not worth it compared to other investments available.
It boasts fast transaction speeds of three seconds, and no fees! This means you can be confident that when you've paid or been paid, the funds are there. You don't have to wait an hour or more to know the transaction has been finalized.
To see a current and historic price chart of Hive, click here.
Hive Power
Hive Power can be considered a measure of influence on Hive. The more Hive Power you have, the larger upvotes you can give on comments and posts. This helps those you upvote, but also earns you more in curation rewards when the post rewards pay out.
Posts you make automatically convert a portion of the rewards to HP. When someone upvotes your comments, those rewards are paid out in HP. As you can see, the more you create and engage, the faster your HP grows.
You can also "Power Up" your HP by converting Hive to HP at a ratio of 1 Hive to 1 HP. You can also "Power Down" HP and convert your HP back to Hive, but it is paid out weekly over 13 weeks.
Lastly, when you've built up enough extra HP, you can delegate it to other organizations and people. In return for delegations, many will pay you in Hive or Tokens (More on this later). The nice thing about delegating is you still keep the HP and can undelegate and time you like. Just know that when you undelegate HP, it takes five days to become available to you again.
HBD
Hive Based Dollars are Hive'a native stablecoin. The idea behind a "stablecoin" is to maintain a value pegged to another asset. In the case of HBD, it is pegged to the US Dollar. It can still fluctuate a little, but the price swings are much less volatile compared to other cryptocurrencies.
You can convert your HBD to the same Dollar equivalent in Hive, but will take 3 days to convert. If you use the Ecency app, you can use the Swap feature to trade your HBD for Hive if there are others willing to make the trade. This is automatically done, so you don't have to worry about trying to find someone yourself.
You can put your HBD into Savings. The APR (Annual Percentage Rate) depends on what all the Witnesses who run Hive nodes (These keep the blockchain going) decide on. Currently it sits at 20%, which is competitive with alternate investments, but it takes 3.5 days to pull funds out of Savings to your available HBD balance.
To see a current and historic price chart of Hive, click here.
