Hive is a blockchain and not a website. Hive is the database that contains all the content and the monetary and all the other types of transactions, including the knowledge of what account follows what other accounts, that take place when people use what are called decentralized applications like hive.blog, peakd.com or 3speak.online. Facebook has a database, too. The difference between Hive and Facebook’s database is that Hive is public and completely transparent and anyone can transact on it without permission from anyone. In contrast, Facebook’s database is owned by Facebook the private corporation. No one else has access to it except by using specific applications built and owned by the Facebook corporation. While Facebook’s users retain copyright to every piece of content they have created, Facebook has ownership and sole access to all the information it has gathered about its users and their activities. Facebook sells that information to the highest bidder and keeps the money. Facebook’s users are not its customers. The real customers are the advertisers who purchase data from Facebook.
What about the content in the Hive database (the blockchain)? Who owns it? Apart from the fact that the content creators own copyright to their content, the knowledge of their interactions with other users and their other actions are public. Anyone is free to make use of them. Another difference is that all the data are not stored on a single server from which it can be easily removed or altered. The contents of the blockchain are stored on a large number of servers owned by several independent parties. The blockchain has a mechanism in place to keep all the servers (called witnesses) in agreement as to what the content is without anyone having to trust a controlling third party. This is how you can transfer money on Hive or be sure that your content will not be censored if you use Hive for those things. Not every Hive user needs to run their own server (witness). The idea is that they can delegate that responsibility to a sufficiently large number of server owners who take part in maintaining the system by running programs on their servers that operate according to the rules of the Hive blockchain. The rules are called a protocol because they tell each participant how they are supposed to interact with each other.
For more info on HIVE: Hive - The Blockchain for Web 3.0
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