Hello, and welcome to Hive.
This article is a 10 minute guide to Hive and why its technology matters to the world. It is written for people who are completely new to the world of web3.
Quick answer to “What is Hive?”
Hive is a big community of people that all use the same technology to do stuff online. Some people make games. Some people make social media sites. Some people make finance stuff. Most people don’t do any of that—they just play the games or use the websites.
You’re reading this post on one of Hive’s many social media sites (the Hive lingo for such a site is a “frontend”). Maybe it says “peakd” or “ecency” or “inleo” in your URL. All different sites, all using Hive.
So what? Why is Hive different?
The big thing is that no one owns Hive. All the value created by using it is shared among the builders and the users. There is no company or any corporate structure behind Hive.
Another huge difference is the ‘shared’ nature of everything. The games, social sites, and finance stuff are all connected together behind the scenes. If you’re not a technical person, that may not seem like something significant, but if you spend enough time exploring Hive, you’ll soon start to ‘get’ it.
A quick example: once you create a Hive account, you instantly have an account for every single thing that uses Hive, and everything that will ever be built on Hive in the future.
One more big thing: stuff on Hive is what we call “censorship-resistant.” Since no one owns it, no one can remove anything you post—not even you. So there’s a tradeoff: things you do on Hive are quite permanent, and always publicly accessible.
Hive is also the “same” as a lot of things
A lot of what you’ll find on Hive resembles the social media sites you know. We have a lot of blogging sites (they all show more or less the same content, they just have different ways of showing it). These mostly look and feel like Facebook, or Medium, or a news site.
- The big “Facebookish” ones are: PeakD, Ecency, InLeo. There are literally dozens out there though since it’s not too hard for a developer to make one.
- A bunch of X equivalents: dbuzz, InLeo Threads, Ecency Waves
- We also have a YouTube equivalent: 3Speak.tv
- An Instagram equivalent: Liketu
- A Wordpress-style publisher for travel blogs: TravelFeed
All these things, if you remember, are known as frontends. They all share the exact same info, just present it in different ways. If you make a post on Peakd, it will appear in Ecency and five dozen other sites that you will never visit or know about :)
Hive games look and feel like browser games. There are people working on a more sophisticated game launcher for more complex games too.
And then there are a couple hundred other projects that can look like normal sites or completely wacky things that make your head hurt. It’s fun, but important for newcomers to stay focused on just a few frontends at the start.
🚨 This is “web3” tech 🚨
See, the technology that Hive stuff uses is—and stay with us—blockchain technology. Yeah yeah yeah, you’ve likely heard that crypto and blockchain is shady or risky. Scams, cons, stupidly priced jpegs.
You know why you’ve never heard of Hive yet? Part of it is because we try to stay out of the blockchain and crypto hype circus, and we use the technology the way it’s supposed to be used—to connect communities and applications together in a transparent, public, and useful way. We try to call this “web3” instead of “crypto.”
No hype circus = low media attention. We’re hoping the good work we’re doing with the tech, communities, and reimagining the way the Internet works will be a positive news story one day. Let’s talk about that work.
How everyday people benefit from Hive
Because many things look the same with Hive, the obvious benefits are also the same as things you already use. Games are (hopefully) fun. Social media and blogging sites connect you with like minded people.
The difference is in the ‘no ownership’ and ‘interconnected’ pieces.
When there is a central owner, usually that company or person is trying to make a business out of having their thing online (an exception to this is Wikipedia, though they still need donations to stay online). Since there’s a business involved, there’s usually a system built in to “capture value” or otherwise make money from the users using the thing.
Facebook doesn’t ask you to pay, but it bombards you with ads and sells your data. (Ads and data selling are just about the most popular way to capture value.)
Hive not only doesn’t do that at large, but it also redirects its value back to all the users. Essentially, Hive is a giant co-op: when you use Hive you start to build up a stake in the system, and the bigger your stake, the more value you can capture. Let’s explore the most common example on Hive:
Blogging to build your stake
Whenever you make a social media post on Hive (using any of the frontends), the Hive community assigns value to these posts, and you get some of it.
At the time of writing, this post for the Scholar & Scribe community paid the author about $0.55 worth of HIVE assets. Here’s another example of the cool ‘shared’ nature of Hive—with that $0.55 of assets, the author could:
- exchange them for gaming tokens and use them to level stuff up or buy trading cards
- exchange them for $HBD tokens and put them in a Hive savings account (currently about 20% APY)
- stake the tokens as Hive Power so they have more say and sway in the Hive ecosystem
- cash them out for other kinds of crypto, or straight cash in their bank account
- any mix of the above, or 300 other things (we’re not gonna list 300 things)
Making “money” on Hive
You might read the above and be thinking: wait, I can get paid to blog?
Technically, yes. But don’t quit your day job. While every social post made on Hive has the potential to earn rewards, it is far from a guarantee. Like anything else in social media, it takes time, discipline, consistency, and a good dash of talent to build up anything substantial.
Take your time to get to know Hive, its communities, and the way the various things work. This will set you up to get the most out of your efforts here.
That said, let’s take a moment to talk about these rewards and the money—admittedly this is the part that usually gets people the most curious.
The Hive Reward Pool
Every 3 seconds, a small amount of $HIVE coins are created and added to a big Reward Pool. This printing gets less and less every year, and will stabilize around 2037.
When you make a post on Hive, or even a comment, people can upvote it or downvote it. Just like on other social sites like Reddit, Facebook, X, etc. Every upvote (or downvote) uses some fancy math to decide how much of the Reward Pool should “go” to the post. The biggest factor in the math is how many $HIVE coins the voter has staked (also known as Hive Power). More on staking a bit later.
After 7 days, the collective upvotes and downvotes and math is finalized, and a payout occurs. Let’s say you make a post and it is assigned to receive 3 $HIVE (about $1 in value at the time of writing). The 3 $HIVE is removed from the Reward Pool and:
- All the voters will split half (1.5 $HIVE)
- The author (you) gets the other half (1.5 $HIVE)
Half of your reward (0.75 $HIVE) will be automatically staked as Hive Power to your account. The other half comes “liquid” in the form of either $HIVE or Hive Backed Dollars ($HBD).
We know that this probably raises more questions than answers. The Hive rewards system is one of the most interesting and complex aspects of this place, so we won’t take up more time in this guide getting into the weeds. There are many people and communities on Hive that can help you learn more. We especially encourage you to join the Terminal Discord and ask all your Hive questions. They’ll be patient with you!
Signing up for Hive: An important note
If you think this is something you want to be a part of—awesome. The first step is getting a Hive account.
Before you jump in, there are some really important things to know:
Above all else: these accounts are NOT like a regular social media account. For one, there is no simple “password recovery” system. We don’t even really use passwords here (more on that in a moment). But if you struggle with remembering or keeping passwords straight… two pieces of advice:
Don’t get involved until you get better at password stuff. Seriously.
If you must get involved, do not invest any serious money into your account.
Remember how no one owns Hive? No company or corporation? This boils down to each user being 100% responsible for their account security. You and you alone. If you forget your Facebook login—no problem, just do a reset. Facebook owns your data and they can go change it and get you a new password easy-peasy.
Hive does NOT own your data and there is nowhere to “go” to reset anything. Let that sink in.
. . .
. .
.
Okay, sunk in yet? Now it’s only fair to tell you we were being slightly dramatic. There actually is an account recovery system but it is tricky and hard to wrap your head around. You don’t want to have to go through it, and it has a good chance of failing if you don’t do everything perfectly.
Signing up for Hive Step 1: Make an account
Since there are hundreds of projects on Hive, there are just as many ways to create an account. Some ask for money, some are free but require an email. You’ve a lot of choices, depending on how anonymous you want to be.
We’ll assume that for your first steps in Hive, you aren’t opposed to using an email address or similar. We recommending signing up with:
- InLeo (lets you use Google or X to sign up)
- Ecency (free email sign up)
- DiscoverHive (small fee to sign up)
- For a full list of options, go here: https://signup.hive.io
Your account name is also called your wallet address. “Wallet” is web3 lingo for account, basically. You’ll get used to it :)
Signing up for Hive Step 2: Key Security
Instead of a password for your wallet, you are given four special keys. The keys are long strings of gibberish—very hard to remember and even type properly.
Whoever knows these keys effectively controls the wallet.
When you make a wallet, only you will have access to the keys. But if someone else gets a hold of them—they also “own” the wallet.
This is different from a password. Very different. Might not seem different at first… but trust us. These keys are way more sensitive than a password. People who are huge crypto nerds (or have huge amounts of crypto) do things like etching these keys onto metal for safe storage. You probably don’t need to go that far today, but in general:
- Do not store your keys in a word document
- You can use a password manager program, but most people don’t recommend that either
- Most recommended: write them down on paper (do not print)
- People sometimes use metal because paper can get burned or ruined
We realize this kind of sounds ridiculous. But when you really let it sink in that you and you alone are responsible for the security of your keys… well… going a little overkill to protect them can be worth it.
Signing up for Hive Step 3: Hive Keychain
Download the Hive Keychain browser extension—it will quickly become your best friend. You can (safely) type some or all of your private keys into it so that you don’t have to deal with typing them a hundred times a day.
The basics of using Hive
Okay, now that you know how to make a wallet, using your new Hive powers is fairly straightforward. Most sites and games behave like you’d expect them to. But there are a few “web3” terms and actions that are good to know about. You’ll encounter all of these soon enough.
Signing transactions
In the blockchain world, a “transaction” is a catchall term for “doing something that changes the blockchain.” Many Hive things require transactions, and you use your private keys to confirm that you are signing (confirming) the transaction.
Hive Keychain will pop up and ask you each time you’re required to sign. It takes care of the keys, and you can also ask it to stop bugging you if you’re doing a lot of transactions with an app that you trust.
Resource Credits (RC)
Hive isn’t the only web3 social thing out there, but it is one of the few that are FREE to use.
The way we keep it free: we give everyone some free transaction credits (aka resource credits) every day. When you’re new, you don’t have a lot of RC so you might get some transaction errors.
To get more RC:
- Someone can lend you some of theirs (go here for a nice free pile)
- You can stake some $HIVE coins (you only need like 10 to give you enough RC to do most things)
Staking Hive for Hive Power (HP)
We’ve used this “staking” term a few times. Here’s what it means: you take some $HIVE coins and you lock them up so you can’t trade them. They’re locked up for a minimum of 13 weeks. When they’re locked up, they become “Hive Power” or HP, and grant you more say and sway over Hive.
To unstake, you just press a few buttons. The amount you want unstaked slowly trickles back into “liquid” $HIVE over the course of 13 weeks.
Staking gives you:
- More say in how Rewards get handed out (your votes are worth more)
- More RC
- More weight in governance—a topic we’ll touch on very briefly next
- About 3% per year in bonus HP (so if you stake 100, in a year you’ll have 103)
- The ability to delegate your HP to others (another huge topic but we won’t cover it here)
Hive Governance: The Witnesses
Final piece before we close. Hive is effectively maintained and run by a group of users called Witnesses. These folks or groups run special servers (called nodes) that make all of Hive… work. Anyone can be a Witness provided they have the technical skills to run those nodes.
There are hundreds of Witnesses but the Top 20 Witnesses matter the most.
Every wallet gets to vote for 30 Witnesses. The weight of your vote is your Hive Power. Many Hive users don’t even care about this, but they sure should, because all the good and bad and crazy and fun of Hive boils down to how these Witnesses operate.
The End
Well, for you, hopefully a bright new Beginning here on Hive.
We know you have more questions, and as chunky as this thing was, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Hive and its possibilities. Come ask your questions in TheTerminal: a Hive Discord for newbies to get oriented. The folks there are super nice.
Or if you’re more into reading, there is a depository of various newbie guides here. There is tons of content in there, including some Spanish translations too.
Good luck!
~
Images in this post were created using a Canva Pro License. PeakD, Ecency, and InLeo logos belong to their respective apps. The Hive logo belongs to all of us :) The human illustrations are by browniemother on Canva.
Posted Using InLeo Alpha
This is a realy great post @jfuji. If I would have had this article two years ago, it would have made my start a lot easier.
Thank you for the kind words!
A great help for newbie like myself, simply and beautifully explained all aspects of Hive. There are so many things to do on HIVE. It's a great opportunity as an earning, too.
All features of Web3 are available on HIVE.
Thank you 🙏 for sharing such a useful guide.
#freecompliments
You're welcome, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
!PGM
BUY AND STAKE THE PGM TO SEND A LOT OF TOKENS!
The tokens that the command sends are: 0.1 PGM-0.1 LVL-0.1 THGAMING-0.05 DEC-15 SBT-1 STARBITS-[0.00000001 BTC (SWAP.BTC) only if you have 2500 PGM in stake or more ]
5000 PGM IN STAKE = 2x rewards!
Discord
Support the curation account @ pgm-curator with a delegation 10 HP - 50 HP - 100 HP - 500 HP - 1000 HP
Get potential votes from @ pgm-curator by paying in PGM, here is a guide
I'm a bot, if you want a hand ask @ zottone444
Bookmarked this awesome post! Thank you so much! ❤️
Cheers! Glad you liked it :)
I've two more in the making for different kinds of audiences as well. Hopefully to be useful for future onboarding.
A well detailed post. saved for future reference thank you 🌺🏵️
This is very helpful, thanks a lot ☺️
My first reblog in ages! What a great guide :)
This post has been manually curated by the VYB curation project
Haha what an honour! <3
Nice piece of article friend, I've really learned a lot. Thanks for your concern to educate newbies in this ecosystem. Really appreciate
What an article for newbie like me I,ve learned so many things in your wonderful right up, keep it up
What an amazing detailed post about Hive. For sure very useful for newbies and not only :) Thank you!
You are welcome!
This guide is very helpful for every presentation about Hive..you delved deeper..bug ups
Thank you for the kind words :)
This is really helpful for all newbies joining this community. I’m glad you shared this. It will go a long way to help anyone who wants to learn and know more🫶🏽
Thank you for saying so! I hope to do more guides for various audiences soon :)
I think this is one of the best simple and direct to the point tutorial out there that a newbie will learn easily. This is worth to share!!!
What I love the most with the Hive community is that we have an equivalent dApps and front-end to Web 2.0 which made it competitive in this space.
Really very good article and this writing is very helpful for every new user
Appreciate you saying so :)
Definitely a complete and up-to-date guide. Short and to the point.
Congratulations on the content you've created, these are just some of the articles I make a point of reading in the Hive community.
Best regards.
It's great to meet you :) Which areas have you explored so far?
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The tip has been paid for by the We Are Alive Tribe through the earnings on @alive.chat, feel free to swing by our daily chat any time you want, plus you can win Hive Power (2x 50 HP) and Alive Power (2x 500 AP) delegations (4 weeks), and Ecency Points (4x 50 EP), in our chat every day.
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Now I have all Kenny logins
Credit: reddit
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Thank you! I hope to create a few more aimed at different audiences in the near future.
The Hive.Pizza team manually curated this post.
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@wrestlingdesires(1/15) tipped @wlffreitas
You can now send $PIZZA tips in Discord via tip.cc!
This is a helpful blog post you put together to guide newbies on Hive. This will be easy to follow.
Thanks for sharing @jfuji
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You nailed it, nice one bro
An excellent guide! Why 2037?
Thank you! You can see the reward pool math here.
In short:
At 1 block per 3 seconds, you can math the ceasing of the decrease down the second (presumably). And that second happens in 2037.
A huge thanks for explaining the math behind Hive inflation. It now made sense to me. 😍
Excellent! There's always something new to learn about Hive haha ;)
Yeah, Hive is the concrete demonstration of what lifelong learning means. 😇
bookmarked!
!PGM
BUY AND STAKE THE PGM TO SEND A LOT OF TOKENS!
The tokens that the command sends are: 0.1 PGM-0.1 LVL-0.1 THGAMING-0.05 DEC-15 SBT-1 STARBITS-[0.00000001 BTC (SWAP.BTC) only if you have 2500 PGM in stake or more ]
5000 PGM IN STAKE = 2x rewards!
Discord
Support the curation account @ pgm-curator with a delegation 10 HP - 50 HP - 100 HP - 500 HP - 1000 HP
Get potential votes from @ pgm-curator by paying in PGM, here is a guide
I'm a bot, if you want a hand ask @ zottone444
Extremely well written guide, shared and bookmarked this for future reference and anyone asking about Hive..
Gonna check with some people and see if what I told them so far matches your guide :-P
We need more of this in the coming run and could do with a bit less drama at the same time hehe
Thanks for saying so! Let me know what those people have to say :)
I'm working on a few more of these in the coming weeks, and hopefully the
hive.iosite is getting some refreshes as well.Looking forward to it! If I get some valuable feedback I'll share it
Thanks for sharing
I love this post . I have learnt a lot. Keep it up.