If you've only got a minimal amount of Hive Powered Up you'll find that you are extremely limited in what you can do on the blockchain.
This is because your Hive Power determines how many Resource Credits (RCs) you have, and the amount of Resource Credits you have determines the amount of transactions you can do on the chain every day.
Resource Credits were introduced three years ago on Hive (which was then Steem) to limit spam, and they are designed to reflect the relative load which different transactions (txs) put on the blockchain.
The way in which RCs are calculated is actually quite complex, but the general gist is that the more data a tx stores to the chain and the longer it takes to compute that data then the higher the RC costs are going to be.
(And I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think the RC costs are dynamic - the busier the chain is, the MORE it costs you in terms of RCs to do anything, so all things behind equal, the more Hive you have powered up the better, as the less likely you are to run out of RCs!).
When it comes to calculating RC costs, there are three main types of transactions, and each of these types has a separate pool of resource credits dedicated to their use.
- Transfers - which I think are just money transfers.
- Comments - which include posts and comments on other people's posts (by far the most expensive in resource credits costs)
- Votes - upvotes.
- (There is also a 'claim account creation token tx, but this is VERY expensive and you need at least 5K HP to be able to do this).
At time of writing the RC cost for each of the main type of TX type is...
- Comments - 1.1 M
- Votes - 0.07 M
- Transfers - 0.18
You can find out how many resource credits you have and the approximate costs per transaction by going to https://hiveblocks.com/@username - you'll find the information on the panel to left, just under the main HP/ RC Panel, which shows your current RCs in a green 'mana bar':
What can you do with 10 Hive Power's worth of Resource Credits?
The screen shot above shows an alt account I've got called @self-track which I've deliberately powered up to 10 HP to keep the maths simple..
10 HP gives me around 20.6 Million mana's (* but see below) worth of Resource Credits, which at a 100% 'full mana charge' is enough for.....
- 11 comments
- 100 + votes
- 64 transfers
RC Mana recharges from zero to full in around 5 days, and in fact the very bottom of the RC info panel tells you, effectively, what your daily usage max is for each type of TX.....
So at 2.2 Million a day (which I get for 10 HP) I can do the following every day:
- Make 2 comments or posts
- Give around 30 votes
- Make around 12 transfers
(*) NB I don't think the Max mana is displaying properly, I know from experience that it takes around 5 days to recharge from zero to 100% RC mana, and a recharge rate of 2.2 a day times five = 11 Million mana, so I don't know what's going on there, but the recharge rate it's what accurate, NOT the total RC Mana - possibly the total is calculated from an early timestamp when RCs were cheaper.)
It should already be clear that 10 HP, even 20HP isn't going to allow you to do that much transacting on the Hive blockchain, and below I demonstrate that with some screenshots showing just HOW MANY RCs different types of TX use!
You can do the same by using hiveblocks.com/@username and simply refreshing after every tx.
Demonstrating the Different RC costs for Splinterlands Transactions...
These seem to act a bit differently to the costs outlined above....
I went on a bit of a transacting rampage with my (rarely used) alt for this....
Starting out...
One card transfer
Cost me 0.6% of my resource credits, so presumably I could do around 180 of these in total, or 35 ish a day allowing for recharge.
Five Rentals
Five rentals used another 1.2% of my RCs, bringing me down to 98.23 resource credits. So this means I can either rent around 400 cards now day or 80 a day on average, allowing for recharge time.
Note the odd amount of RCs is because it's already recharging!
One comment
Yowser, down to 92% after just one comment - so I can make maybe 2 or 3 of these a day with 10 HP allowing for recharge.
Voting Spree - 10 upvotes
Cost me another 6% - so I can easily max out my votes for curation returns if I need to, these are cheap!
Final Thoughts - Splinterlands is relatively cheap in terms of RC usage....
A mere 10 HP gives you enough RCs to rent around 80 cards a day (NB purchasing may be more expensive in RC costs) OR transfer around 30 cards, this should be enough for even the more active players.
Although NB cancelling rentals will also cost in terms of RCs.
However if you want to get active blogging, you will need at least 30HP to be able to make around 5 comments a day, 10, or even 20 wouldn't cut it!
P.S. I'm not 100% sure the RC costs on Hiveblocks tally up with the actual costs, DYOR to find out more!
NB Splinterlands GamePlay is now stored off-chain - so you can play as many games as you like RC free.
But any NFT transactions you want to make, like buying, selling, renting cards, THEY ALL COST Resource Credits.
Find out More...
Here are a few links for yer further reading....
https://developers.hive.io/tutorials-python/rcdemo.html
https://developers.hive.io/tutorials-recipes/calculate_rc_recipe.html
https://developers.hive.io/tutorials-recipes/rc-bandwidth-system.html
https://developers.hive.io/tutorials-recipes/rc-bandwidth-parameters.html