It's no secret that Hive has a higher APR than a savings account. It's also riskier because Hive prices fly up and down all the time. Basically, it's a high-yield high-returns kind of deal.
If you trust the project to keep increasing the value of your money, and you accept the risk, many of us put a percentage of what we own into Hive and use it to earn curation rewards.
However, most people don't have the time to check Hive 24/7 for things to vote to get the best efficiency on our votes. There are three solutions that most investors fall into.
- Delegate your HP to a curation project and get the curation rewards in the form of a scheduled transfer.
- Hire someone to vote for you and get the rewards as HP
- Follow high-voted authors and high-quality voters on hive.vote and get the rewards as HP.
Many curation projects pretend to be the solution to everything, and will sell you their snake oil, getting you to delegate to them. Many of them don't have good terms, and you will end up losing a lot of returns, at a higher risk, than you could have if you had done a little research.
As I have already done a little research, I will give you some facts and tools to help you with your investment.
Percentage of rewards
When you do the voting yourself, you get 100% of the rewards of your votes. This is obvious. However, if you're not a talented voter or don't have the proper tools, there's a high chance that your money won't make as much in returns as it could. In this case, you can delegate your HP to a curation project and have them find the proper posts to vote, and then they'll give you a percentage of the rewards they make with your money.
Many of these projects will promise you 100% of the vote. Others will not. A curation project, for example, posted a comment on one of my posts to promote its service. They offer 80% of the curation rewards they make. I know that I would get more, for example, if I delegated my money to @ocdb instead (I believe they redistribute 100% of the rewards made with delegated HP back to its owners).
Vote efficiency
However, knowing the percentage of rewards you will get is not the definitive measure of quality. A bad-quality voter could offer you 100%, and a good-quality voter 90%, and if the latter is way more efficient, you will get even more money back than you would with the former. Therefore, you must do some research.
Here, I will offer you a couple of tools that you can use to judge where to put your money. The first is hivetasks.com and the second one is hivestats.io. Let's take a look at how they work:
HiveTasks.com
HiveTasks is a Hive mirror of the old Steem tool called SteemWorld (not usable on Hive but on Steem).
After the @ in the link, type the account name that you wish to research (for example: https://hivetasks.com/@ocdb). Scroll down to Coming Rewards, click Curation Rewards, and you can see the person's voting efficiency. Do this with any voting project you wish to delegate to or follow with your votes on hive.vote.
HiveStats.io
This is a more complete tool, which shows not only the curation efficiency but an estimated APR (Annual Percentage Rate, basically which % of your money you make back in a year through curations).
Efficiency
APR
The comparison stage
Many projects urge you to delegate to them, but we first have to research. Let's compare a few projects as an example. Again, I'll show you the results of the curation project that offered me to delegate my HP to them in exchange for 80% of their curation rewards:
Again, they offer me 80% of the curation rewards they get from each vote made with my money. My average efficiency is instead the following:
And I get 100% of my own rewards (clearly, I'm the one voting). Therefore, it would not make sense for me to lower the efficiency of my HP from ~104% to ~60% (80% of 75%).
Now let's take a look at @ocdb's voting efficiency:
If your interest is not only to make money, but to promote good content as well, OCDB is certainly a good choice , as they reward good quality content with votes, while other projects are not as scrupulous and will upvote anything as long as it's efficient.
Additionally, if you were, for example, to follow my votes and upvote anything I upvote in order to be more efficient than the average investor's 60 to 70%, you would end up making a number that is not very dissimilar to OCDB's, maybe a tiny bit more (I'd estimate 85-92% efficiency). If you were to follow OCDB's votes, your efficiency would be very low (50-60%) due to the curation algorithm.
My thought process
Here's what I would think about when considering my choices. Let's say the choice were between following the votes of this hypothetical @cryptosharon or delegating my HP to @ocdb. I would not be the one making the votes, my rewards would be controlled by the whims of OCDB, and when I pull out my money, I'd be bound to a 7-day nothing-period where my earnings would be null. I could instead earn the same, but be free to stop at any second, and if I find a more efficient voter, I could change my trail on hive.vote to that account in a flash.
The reality
However, the matter doesn't end here and there are many more accounts that are voting out there. If you look at people's wallets and see a lot of rewards coming in, check out where it's coming from. Don't pick a lazy choice to manage your savings. This is a long-term choice, and it will decide how much you make long-term, for a year or more, or however long you stay. You could have 11% APR or 6%. Hive is not low-risk investment, so if you're counting on these funds for the future, take care of them.
What I do
I follow a couple of high-efficiency curation trails. I changed one for another today and expect my own efficiency to rise at least 10% by the end of the week. That will put me at 30% higher than if I were delegating to OCDB, and 55% higher than if I were delegating to the first curation project I mentioned.
I pay attention to a lot of things on the blockchain, and I'm quite tech-savvy. If anyone wants a guide about the best way to follow someone's votes, or about any related topic, throw a comment. I read them all. I hope you found this useful or at least entertaining.
Hey @cryptosharon!
@eddiespino here! This account (@aliento) is actually on the process of becoming a curation project among other things like supporting the community and giving advice to new and not that new users. I've been curating content in the past month, I onlu have around 9,500 Hive Power (most of it is delegated from my personal account) and sometimes my votes are followed by big accounts.
This is my vote efficiency atm:
And thank you for recommending HiveTasks!
That's great efficiency! :)
Sometimes when a small vote follows a big vote, the efficiency is reduced, but with your numbers, I'm not sure the difference would be too noticeable as you're way above what I've seen up until now! I could try to follow your votes for a while and see how my average moves. I'll add it to my calendar.
I think my efficiency is like this because this past week I manage to find great posts that were almost in zero and later they got very big votes, one got to 54 in total, and the other almost 40 HTU. I'm not sure if I'll be able to replicate this again, but feel free to follow my votes.
It'll wait a bit. I will check up on you in a few weeks. I'm currently testing another trail! :)
Hello Cripto_sharon, Thank you for your post.
I Am interested in follow some good curator in an automatic way.
maybe you could be the girl.
Mañana en la tarde escribo una pequeña guía y te respondo para notificarte :)
Here you go
https://peakd.com/hive-148441/@cryptosharon/a-guide-for-investors-how-to-earn-high-curation-rewards-on-hive-by-following-curator-votes
Muy buen artículo, por cierto llevaba tiempo buscando algo como steemworld y gracias por recomendarme hivestaks, ya conocía la otra herramienta, pero aún no me convencía.
Sobre tu post, creo que soy más de votar las publicaciones que yo considero buenas, y sigo a una que otra comunidad, aunque tal vez en un futuro haga lo que tú haces
:) Yo usaba muchísimo SteemWorld, así que descubrir HiveTasks me alegró el día también!
A mí me gusta optimizar mi voto. A veces puedo votar manualmente, pero como mi presencia es muy irregular, es la diferencia entre hacer 10 Hive en un año y hacer 500 jajaja, así que delego la gran mayoría de mis votos a hive.vote
Acabo de hacer una guía como continuación a esta. Mi equilibrio es lo que puse en la sección de "selección". Solo sigo a trails que apoyen el contenido que me gusta.
Damn!
I am late to the party, but this was amazing...Thanks for this, I am going to play around a bit!
Please note that the voting algorithm has changed somewhat. Some of the changes are: voting time matters less, there is no 15 minute or 5 minute or any minute penalty if you vote too early, among other things. Please read about those if you're going to be choosing a voting algorithm to invest in, as your % income may be doubled if you do it right!
Thanks I am planning on still curating manually and keep following big curators trail.
For now my APR is 6%, so I got to improve my efficiency!
rn my apr is 8% using the old algo! will try to improve soonish as i want something above the 12% mark
So how do you improve it now if it's not about the timing anymore?
8% is cool, how did you manage to improve it? Which trails do you follow?
Sorry, I just did my calculations again with a proper methodology, and it turns out I had made a mistake. My current APY is not 8% but 13%, but this is not taking into account that I have just powered down around 20% of my HP, so being pessimistic, my APY is around 10.7-11%. (I would personally estimate it around 11.7).
This is amazing!
I can't even imagine the workload, but if you start working on it let me know, I'll gladly test it for you once it's ready 😃
Cheers!
I follow a friend right now hahahah, he has a good trail, he's @lunaticpandora. I don't honestly know whom he follows.
Right now, I haven't researched the new algo enough to know how to improve. I have a few theories that I'd like to play with, including following a selection of curators for OCD, following some big votes, and, you know, just testing to see what works and what doesn't. I could use other accounts to test alternative trail settings and then import the best settings to the main account.
I also have the knowhow to make my own scripts to have some smarter algorithms, but it takes a lot of time and I'm busy with other kinds of work that pay better. If I were to get paid to make these curation/vote bots, I would certainly approach this with more enthusiasm and success ;)