Let's talk about Elon for a second....
Unless you have been living under a rock, you'll know that everyone's favorite billionaire decided to buy Twitter a few months ago. Since then, you either love what he's done with the place, or hate it. One of the more curious decisions he made was to take away everyone's 'verified blue check mark' and make people pay for it.
Why is this such a big deal?
Let's look at the history of the 'Verified' status on Twitter. This was limited to the who's who of influencers, politicians, sports figures, businesses etc. You know, the real 'gems' of society. Even though there's claims that one could 'buy' a Verified blue check mark before Elon, the story was you had to earn it. No other way around it.
Anyways, Elon took that away and now those gems of society have to pay to play.
That's what the glorious blue check mark represented, and for better or worse, it was a status symbol in social media.
So what about Hive?
Do we have something similar here?
I'd argue we have something much better. And yeah, it's got it's faults but let's look into the 'reputation score' beside our names.
(Disclaimer, I'm pretty sure I'm not exactly at level 80 yet according to Hiveblocks, but we're using this for an example lol)
Beside each of our names, is a score based on our reputation on the chain. Now it's a funky algorithm the the super smart developers on the blockchain came up with but essentially it works like this...And I'm being very vanilla with it's description...
The more value you add to the chain, the more upvotes you gets, the more your score increases.
Now again, it's way more complicated than that, and it gets harder and harder the higher you get, but you can see the top 'reputation scores' via 
And if you look at the top 50 or so accounts with the highest reputation, I'm sure there will be debates about how much value each has given to the chain. But you start seeing some familiar names up there that have basically dedicated their lives to this blockchain. These aren't members of the community that showed up last week and 'bought' their way up....
(Yes yes I know about the bid bots back in the day....)
But the point is, the majority of the top reputation scores on Hive have earned that rep from adding value.
Adding value. We here that term thrown around a lot these days. And if you have ever tuned into the Crypto Maniacs podcast by 
Is it always represented by the reputation scores? Not always, because adding value comes in many different shapes and sizes. Splinterlands' rep score is 69, but I don't think anyone would say they haven't added value to the chain.
The reputation score to me is the pulse of how you're perceived on chain. It's not gospel by any means, but to me it's something I always want to improve.
Yeah closer look tells me, I'm not yet at 80 even though most of the front ends say I am lol But look at that number to the side of it....
71 moons. Joined in December 2017.
That's a whole lot of TIME dedicated to adding value to Hive. In my own unique way I guess, and that goes for everyone on their own journey here. The time, effort and value you add....Comes out (sometimes) in your reputation score.
Personally, I'd love to see more emphasis placed on it. There is so much we can do with it. But of course, it needs to be worked on. However the blue print is there, for Hive to start building it's very own 'verified blue check mark'....
And I think what we build on Hive will mean so much more than anything Elon is charging for these days :)
