You no longer have to reply to yourself with @hivebits (HBIT) or @Wusang. To mine Hivebits, just use an HBIT anywhere on Hive. Feel free to help me work out the kinks by trying it here. Just type the !HBIT command in the comments.
Two things to note:
Remember, HBIT is hard-coded at only one-per-day.
I'm currently working on this, there may hiccups.
With apologies, I've totally flipped and flopped back and forth on this policy.
Here's why:
The reason for instituting the you-must-reply-to-yourself rule was to avoid people taking over another person's post or comment. However, I saw several instances where an HBIT miner would reply to someone, then also reply to their own reply with an HBIT mining command. So, instead of cutting back on replies, the original author of the post being replied to now had TWO added replies. Talk about the law of unintended consequences!
By allowing an HBIT command to work in reply to another Hiver, it becomes a small bit of a tipping bot. The person invoking the HBIT command gets 0.9 HBIT, the person being replied to gets 0.1 HBIT. It's not much, but at least it's something. It's paying that person rent for using his or her post or comment.
There is something of a network effect in replying to someone else and gifting them a small token. They may wonder what it is or they may see how it works.
From the start, one of the things I wanted for HBIT to be was an easy way for a newcomer to engage with Hive. Someone could literally make an account today, then include an HBIT command in a post or comment and they're instantly mining Hivebits and playing Wusang. They likely don't know it, but they're also engaging with the Hive-Engine sidechain. They don't need to hold a minimum of tokens to do this, or stake a minimum, they just need a Hive account and to use the command. Removing the reply-to-yourself rule makes things that much easier.
Incentives matter. With 10% of the HBIT going to the author being replied to, there is an incentive for Hivers to set up a "Mine your HBIT here!" post and encourage anyone to do just that.
The original purpose of HBIT was to be a proof-of-comment or proof-of-effort token: you do some effort, you get the token. Period. This still very much exists. If you reply to yourself, you still will get 100% of the HBIT. And, there's no shame in doing this...that has been the entire point from the start. I do it myself because, (a) that's the point...proof-of-effort, and (b) it interferes with no one else's posts.
Note that the Wusang game is still embedded into HBIT. If you mine HBIT, you're automatically playing Wusang: Isle of Blaq. This means you'll still have a chance at finding bonus treasure tokens of BLAQ, BLADGOLD, and BLAQEMRLD.
Try it. Just make a post or reply and include one of the commands, like !HBIT. Feel free to do it in the comments here.
