What are Resource Credits?

We are about to relaunch our delegation tool, and before we do that, we want you to understand resource credits and what they do. This isn't an in depth guide, but instead a short introduction to get familiar with

Resource Credits(RC) were introduced as of hard fork 20, to replace bandwidth. The use of resource credits is to prevent spam and only allow a limited amount of transactions, scaling with the amount of stake the user has. If you use traditional social media, and start doing a lot of actions, they rate limit you, and RC does that for the Hive blockchain. Each transaction that you do on the blockchain has a cost associated with it. In most chains, the fee is paid in the currency of the chain. On Hive, its a "freemium"(words taken from Steemit Inc.) model. You pay with Resource Credits, which you get in relation to your stake. This prevents users from creating accounts, and just spamming with them. If they want to do anything, they have to start powering up stake, locking it up for 13 weeks.

You automatically get resource credits when you power up Hive, or receive a delegation of HivePower. The higher your stake, the higher the amount of RC that you get. This means that accounts with higher stake can perform a lot more actions on the blockchain.

If you lightly use the chain to vote a bit, comment, and occasionally post, as long as you have at lest 30 HP, you most likely won't see any problems using the chain. But sometimes, you might see an error saying that you need x amount of Resource Credits to perform the action, and you have less than that. Each action has a cost associated with it, and you can check it out here thanks to @holger80. You can check out the current and max amount of RC for your account by going to https://hiveblocks.com/@giftgiver and replacing giftgiver with your username.

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_{Taken from HiveBlocks}

If the amount of RC you have is under the cost of the action, you can't do it. Don't worry about using up all your RC and never getting them back, you regain RC every day at a rate of 20% of your max every day. So if you drop down to 0 RC, it will take 5 days to get back up to max. That might sound like a long time, but for the average user, you won't see any problems, and you usually have more RC than you need.

If you run out of RC, the quickest way to get more is to stake some Hive. If you can't do that, you can try and get a delegation. At GiftGiver, we provide free delegations to those who are out of RC, all you have to do is head over to our site at https://giftgiver.site and type in your username and as long as you are low on RC, we'll provide you a temporary delegation, with no cost to you at all. This feature is currently disabled, and will be reenabled over the weekend as we finish our migration to Hive.