NOTE: this post was written for crypto curious people on Medium. I'm posting it here as some new to the platform might find it helpful.
Yesterday I celebrated my fifth anniversary of writing on a blockchain and earning crypto. A while later I had a chat with @WriterKat who has recently started on Hive and is helping out with the testing of @DreemPort. Thank you for your help @WriterKat.
One of the items we talked about is the learning curve. There is a a lot more to learn about how a platform works in crypto. It’s not just write your post and build your tribe. That’s important. So is understanding the mechanics of earning and protecting your earnings. And the different ways of earning.
This article will be focusing on being a brief overview of what makes the Hive experience different. I invite you dear reader to drop questions in the comments. My focus is on the Hive blockchain.
There is total transparency. With a utility called a blockchain explorer, anyone can find and see everything that has happened on the chain. That also means, your earnings are not private. Anyone can look in your earnings wallet.
When you write anything on a blockchain like Hive, it stays there, forever. Even if you later edit it and try to change what you said, the original content is there along with the edits.
The Hive blockchain doesn’t have an owner. It takes a community of devs coming together to develop the chain and maintain the chain collectively. The community which develops on the chain has a say in the running through a mechanism based on how much Hive Power (HP) they have. More on that later.
There is one blockchain (Hive) which has multiple sites (frontends). This gives you access to putting content on the Hive. For most writers new to Hive, this is a point of confusion.
When I write on Medium, the content shows up on that one site.
When I write on Hive, the post will show up on multiple sites, all part of Hive. For example, I write my posts on Peakd.com, and they show up on Ecency.com and Palnet.io to name a few.
Not every front end will show my posts. Some of them are specialized and would only display related posts. I haven’t written any posts on the subject of natural medicine, so my author page there says I’ve not written anything yet.
As you might be guessing by now, the Hive blockchain has an ecosystem.
Applications built on it, all interconnected. My account gets me access to it, it’s like an all points pass. The sites/apps are not just for writers. The apps being built on the Hive blockchain are limited only by the imaginations and technical skills of the creators.
I was going to go into an overview of the ecosystem. I think I’ll give it a post of its own. Stay tuned.
Earning on Hive needs an investor mindset. It’s not just post, earn, get paid like on Medium. On Medium writers post and by some mysterious algorithm, if they get views from other paid members they earn from a few pennies to a few dollars. No one knows how that is done, except we need lots of readers.
On Hive, you need other people to upvote your post. Their upvotes will pay according to how much Hive they have staked (locked in). The more they have, the more you’ll earn. The voters also earn. Yeah, I said that, the voters also earn.
At the end of seven days, the value of the post is split between the author and those who voted. The voters get a slice based on their stake and when they voted. That part is a bit mysterious but for most people it’s a small part of their earnings. At first your votes will not show a value. As your account grows so will the value of your vote.
So what has that to do with an investor mindset? If you constantly draw out your earnings on Hive, your account doesn’t grow. It’s in growing your account and holding your earnings where your real earning happens.
Crypto value is influenced by the ups and downs of the markets. If you earn a lot at a low value and keep on cashing it in, it wont be there for when the markets go up and you can really earn some profit.
For example, when I started five years ago, the market was falling. It dropped to a low of 7cents. A lot of people quit writing on the chain. They didn’t think it was worth their time. I kept going, kept on building my account. When the market turned upward (and it always does) I was not at all upset to take profit when STEEM hit $8. Patience and persistence paid off.
Some of my profit I held back and waited for the drop (which also always comes). Then I used it to invest in a few other cryptos. I also could have bought back into Steem at the lower price for future earnings.
When you hold HP and HBD, you earn interest. Your Hive Power earns interest as long as you leave it staked. Currently it’s about 3.25% annually. There is a second token called Hive Backed Dollar (HBD) that you can earn. If you choose to transfer HBD into savings, you can earn about 10%.
Your account has keys as passwords. Don’t ever lose them. We’re used to signing up to a site and if we lose our password, we can set another one. Doesn’t happen on the blockchain. You will get a key or more. On Hive, you get 4 keys. They all have a purpose, make sure you keep your keys private and safe. If you lose them, you lose access. You lose your investment.
You need Resources Credits to do things on Hive. On other sites you can usually post and interact as much as you want. It’s up to the site to keep adding server resources to handle the load of activity. The blockchain doesn’t work that way. The blockchain runs on multiple nodes operated by people who have invested their resources into the chain.
When I joined Steem, I could post and comment as much as I wanted. So could all the spammers and scammers who would sign up with multiple accounts and spam peoples posts looking for upvotes. The load on the servers became huge and the performance became terrible.
The effort to solve the load problem and discourage spammers and scammers involved coding in Resource Credits (RCs). Members had to earn RCs in order to interact on the chain. The number of RCs they have is dependent on how much Hive Power they have. RCs used in a day would regenerate over time. They were not a cost, more like battery power.
New users for the most part started out with zero or just a few HP to get them started. This seriously limited people who were just there to do things right. A practice of giving new users delegation to get them going has become common.
Delegation is like a loan that can be sent to a user. It shows up on their account like they had HP of their own. The delegator can withdraw the delegation at any time. I delegate out a lot of my holdings to newbies. Periodically, I review who have delegations out to. If they have grown their account I’ll pull the delegation to have it available to other new users. The same for people I’ve delegated to who are inactive. If the delegation isn’t being made use of, it goes to someone else who will use it.
I think I’ve covered the major points that are different when writing on a blockchain like Hive. By now, you may have be thinking — Why would I want to?
More places to write and earn is always of value. As I wrote earlier, if you treat the earnings as an investment, it can grow exponentially. If you’ve been writing say on Medium, you have a portfolio of content you can re-purpose and start earning on.
I’ve not even touched on the multiple tokens you can earn which will compound your investment even more. I’ll talk about them in the ecosystem post.
