This guide assumes you know how to backup and secure cryptographic private keys/wallets.
Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or a recommendation to invest in HIVE. Many of the trade-offs necessary to make an attempt at decentralized social media have made this network unsuitable for use as money. However these tradeoffs provide best-available censorship resistance at a time when it is badly needed. There is no Layer 2 option on the horizon. This is working now.
D.Buzz
A “Twitter” interface for hive chain. There are some basic features missing at this time (dms, RT's) but being added quickly- consider it early access. There is no app yet but the mobile web UI is good. A great team is building this who is very free speech oriented, though it’s not open source just yet- There are plans for this once it gets a bit further. Like all http endpoints, they could censor here if they chose. I can give my personal endorsement that I don’t think it’s an issue with the dbuzz team, of course the wise ones worry about the future so let’s examine the platform.
"Buzzes" are written to the hive blockchain, your posts are as immutable as any tx there. As you might expect, it’s less censorship resistant than Bitcoin. Hive is a DPoS consensus protocol, where staked coins (Hive Power) vote on validators. Top 21 wins. Problems with this system is a whole post in itself, I actually find it less hard than other forms of PoS- but I am not trying to sell you on the future of finance here, just the future of social media. Also, D.buzz administrators can “mute” posts which does not remove them from the chain, but carries a tag so that most front ends will likely not display it.
Regardless of how dbuzz feels about your posts however, your content is written to chain and visible from other interfaces:
https://hive.blog/trending/hive-193084
https://peakd.com/c/hive-193084/created
You could tweet from a hive wallet command line if you have the skills. Just point it at the dapp “community”.
D.Buzz is an interface for a hive blockchain community/channel/subreddit. You can use any interface to read/write to it. There is little real capacity to ban you, certainly not if you run a p2p node locally. While the dbuzz interface is not presently open source, once they do open it you will be able to run a copy locally and point it at any node you like, including your own.
All 21 validators must conspire to attempt to censor you. Possible, but not without effort. Attacking is less costly than PoW but still not free, and some very powerful attacks may require human intervention.
I don’t want to seem too negative here- timestamping the deluge of text that is social media is likely the most demanding task you can ask of a blockchain. Even LBRY centralizes their comments. There is no getting away from the problem. However, for all its flaws, I do believe it’s quite better than kicking the can down the road to parler which is already under attack, or playing whack-a-mole on federated gab/mastodon/bitcoinhackers. A method for forking-away from an overwhelmingly powerful attacker has already been demonstrated, creates a full duplication of the network and audience, and is cheaper than the cost of attacking. This isn’t a holy grail maybe, but- it’s a substantially more powerful tool than available alternatives. If you are successfully attacked like STEEM was (which involved premine abuse) you fork away with the database and do not have to start over.
How to Use it
It’s account-based. You get to select a named @ handle rather than generating a hash. Interacting with the chain (Posting, commenting,likes/up/downvoting) requires expending Resource Credits that recharge over time. There are a lot of moving parts that determine your maximum, recharge rate, and how much things cost, but right now you can comment daily for holding about 50 cents. A portion of the block rewards is given to users for posting and curating and staked hive accrues some small interest, and Hive Power can be delegated to other users. It’s common for new accounts to be delegated Hive Power for a time so most users should be able to get in and interact normally for free and build up permanent HP never paying a satoshi. This is an uncapped supply coin, so this might be sustainable as well- with some demand spike hiccups.
HBD is a chain native stablecoin based on oracle data from the validators. Don’t hold that either.
New accounts must be created from existing accounts. There are numerous dapps/faucets/entities that will generate one for you, or you can get one from someone with enough HP to claim accounts.
Some are phone-only, some are email-only, some just want to be paid for it. The most easily anonymous way I was able to think to create one would be with a throwaway email verified through ecency.com, there may be other ways. The Ecency app is nice as well.
Try to keep the eyebrows down on these next few steps- remember this is social media not money
Your account generator will generate and send you a set of keys. Yes, private ones. You only need the password. IMMEDIATELY go to
Your password is essentially your master private key. Resetting this will regenerate the other keys. Use it as little as possible, and use the key with the least permissions necessary to do what you want to do.
You can see what the keys are for on the keys & permissions page and most apps requiring only the posting key is one reason it’s a little better than pasting your private key into websites. The fact that you’re copying them all out of a website is another problem but hey, this is a social media account. Didn’t I tell you not to buy it? You can probably get a little more hardcore with this using a CLI wallet but your account will still have to come from somewhere or someone.
IMPORTANT: Whoever made your account can reset your password and take possession of your account. If you’re onboarding a normie, having that recovery account- normally set to the app they made the account through- can let them fix things in the more traditional way via email/phone and will be comfortable leaving this alone. Crypto people will perhaps want to follow this guide:
https://peakd.com/hive/@deathwing/psa-change-your-recovery-account-now
You can set it to yourself to make your account unrecoverable. Make sure to do this if you used a throwaway for account generation.
Some dapps like peakd.com use a OAUTH service known as hivesigner, to even further limit the number of times you have to dish out a key. You can revoke permission for any dapp to use your keys as well- both from hivesigner like revoking traditional OAUTH but dapp permission to use your keys is also on-chain data and can be revoked there as well. There is also a “metamask-style" browser plugin.
Brigading crews
Hive is a public blockchain. Users are free to put on a crown, brigade and downvote you as spam. It’s important to note that downvotes only affect potential block rewards, and some dapps may choose to use it in their front-end ranking algos. There is nothing they can do to stop you from talking, or others listening. I don’t think many Bitcoiners care if they get their tweet-pennies. They can’t turn you off.
Would be curious to hear your opinions on these problems whenever you get some time to write about it.
Regardless - thanks for helping get the word out. The purge on social media this week has been interesting to witness in real time. Perhaps people will now give blockchain solutions an honest look. I think the purging has only just begun. They'll probably move on to real-life social circles soon.
Hugo Nguyen has a bunch of great work on the topic on his medium
https://hugonguyen.medium.com/proof-of-stake-the-wrong-engineering-mindset-15e641ab65a2
https://hugonguyen.medium.com/proof-of-stake-private-keys-attacks-and-unforgeable-costliness-the-unsung-hero-5caca70b01cb
Indeed the whole reason this chain exists is due to a long tail event problem with DPOS that required humans to fix. And that's fine for a social network but not for a world reserve currency.
DPOS solves A few of the problems of regular PoS But introduces others (Validator collusion or coercion), either way what you get out of it is a massively increased throughput. Traditionally in blockchain a high throughput has been advertised as something desirable to compete with Visa, but should be recontextualized as a useful tool for social media. Visa is an L2 anyway.
The problem wasn't necessarily with DPOS. It was the launch of the Steem blockchain where the launching party accumulated over 80% of the initial "bootstrap" mining period. It was a questionable launch (massive stake accumulation) + DPOS. That opened the door to a hostile takeover, which was aided by centralized exchanges using custodial funds to stake those tokens and vote for consensus witnesses by the attacker.
In the hard fork where we split from the Steem blockchain, what remained from the original pool of tokens from the Steem "ninja-mine" was put into the decentralized fund that's being used for various development and marketing proposals. So that massively disproportionate stake can no longer be held over the chain as an attack vector.
Hive also just recently hard forked and added a protocol to address similar potential attacks by exchanges or "bad actors." The protocol adds a 30-day waiting period on newly-staked tokens so that a wallet cannot stake and then instantly attempt to attack the network via validator voting. It gives the network time to recognize and address an impending attack on it - time to "circle the wagons," as some have put it. This would still be difficult to pull off, as it would require quite a large amount of tokens to be acquired and staked. And as noted with the Steem-Hive situation, users can simply split away from the attacker, taking their communities and apps with them.
It essentially makes an attack both unreasonable and costly due to the likely risk of failure. With Steem, Justin Sun already bought the main company behind the blockchain, so he was "locked in" to his investment at that point and most likely did not foresee the reaction. There's currently no company or sizable stake like that on Hive.
Regarding Hugo Nguyen's articles you linked...
I find his arguments against POS to be lacking, particularly his criticisms over attack vectors.
The idea that someone will be torturing any Hive witnesses, or all 17 of the top 21 needed for consensus, in order to attack and take over the chain is quite laughable. Likewise for any of the largest stakeholders that could possibly control all of the consensus witnesses. And again, even if either of these were to happen, a new chain could be spun up and the old one abandoned. Balances could be taken from the most recent valid snapshot, and then exchanges could simply update to the new version and leave the compromised chain/token hanging.
Simply stealing keys also has a remedy on Hive in the form of account recovery. But stolen keys isn't a problem that's exclusive to POS chains, so I don't think that's a valid reason to put POW above POS. You would need to steal a lot of separate account keys in order to gain the stake needed to control consensus.
The benefits gained from DPOS are faster speed, lower cost, lower hardware requirements, lower energy consumption, and increased agility when facing potential failures and attacks. Proof-of-work may be more secure in the strict sense of a "brute" attack, but a successful 51% attack on a POW network would be more devastating to that network than an attack on POS or DPOS network would be. And given that there are already massive mining networks, a 51% attack on a chain like Bitcoin certainly isn't impossible or even improbable. If we're going to accept Nguyen's "Black Swan" argument, then a successful attack is inevitable.
The Hive community already survived one.
This may not make the tokens here the most reliable form of money (and I would argue that the reasons for this are completely unrelated to DPOS and are rather in the rewards protocols themselves), but it does prove the case that Hive can offer not only censorship resistance, it can also offer network attack resistance to an extremely large degree. And there are still protocols that can be improved upon.
I agree it's harder now than on steem and did make it a point to show that it's fairly easy to break away from a successful attacker- and I think most reasonable people would think it's fine to recover a social network in this way.
But making problems more unlikely doesn't eliminate them, and to date PoW is the only system that can recover from these events without a human, and on top of that you need home users to be able to run their own sovereign full node on as little equipment as possible to achieve "full" censorship resistance & immutability. 51% attacks are mostly just inconvenient. You are supposed to wait 6 blocks for finality on btc, technically
I also agree that the tradeoffs DPOS makes in these areas are fine for it's use case. This is a great platform for a social network and people should use it. It's just not the kind of thing to put your life savings into maybe.
I think we disagree on how easy it might be to socially attack DPOS validators. I have been watching every major US brand, tech giant, social media platform, cable news and newspaper launch a coordinated assault on democracy for the past 4 years. But even this is easily forked away from more cheaply than it would be to pull off. Hive is a very powerful weapon for speech.
Wanted to add this tidbit: Hive has no ninja-mine; the largest holder has 3%. It takes roughly 30%+ to take out the top witnesses now. The exchange attack (Binance, Huobi, Polo) powering up users' funds for 3 months, and using it to overthrow the network has been solved. Any newly powered up stake takes 1 month before it is allowed to vote in governance. Any exchange attack now will not only lock their funds for 4 months if they wish to attack the network, but we would see it from a mile away.
Furthermore, I don't even think you can buy 30% of the liquid Hive in existence if you wanted to. If someone tried to attack, it would make us all very rich; if they were successful, we would be so rich that we could easily have resources to fork again, dump the token the attacker is buying and getting a free airdropped token like last time. Many Hivers doubled their net worth during the hostile takeover, selling their Steem and keeping their Hive for free. Without the ninja-mine, such an attack would be nearly impossible. It's an attack I welcome wholeheartedly.
And running a full node on Hive is easier than ever. It is effortless for anyone to run a full node, so we are very agile and decentralized from the point of entry standing as well. If any witnesses were corrupted (most are anon btw), we would easily see it and either unvote them from consensus quickly or fork the network again. Trying to capture Hive in a centralized way is like trying to catch air with a net. We still have whistleblowers' text on the chain; if governments could remove it, they would have already. Any attack on the network would make Hive go viral, the same way the hostile takeover did. The more you attack us, the stronger and more resilient we are. Hive is 10x more advanced than Steem, which should tell you something about this chain's anti-fragile.
With Parler proving to be a very fragile place, guides like this are important to spread real decentralized alternatives. A guide like this should exist on https://leopedia.io I wish @khaleelkazi could add this to the articles there.
Great tutorial for getting started!
Great guide, welcome to Hive! Bitcoin & Hive go hand & hand. Censorship-resistant money needs cenorship-resistant speech.
https://twitter.com/foxon/status/1348500516217651201
Is it possible to edit the beneficiaries in our account? How to do that? :)
Yes. Click on the advanced tab at the bottom of editing a post. You can choose beneficiaries for the rewards of the post you are working on, and what percent each person gets. Peakd lets you do this.
is it possible to do this on JSON metadata level where usually hiveonboard and tipu are set as default?
Hope it will be successful campaign to onboard more users. I am following the news and I believe now is the perfect time to onboard more people even i know d.buzz will have more updates in the future. But I think we are already ready for more users. Thank u for your efforts :)
Hey @snacky,
I stepped away from https://D.Buzz in November of 2021, to focus on health . . but I returned about 4 to 5 months ago, and we just released a new major update yesterday.
Over 60+ fixes & updates.. I hope you're well.
~ @chrisrice