Posts

New Users - Let's Talk About Staking

avatar of @erikah
25
@erikah
·
·
0 views
·
4 min read

I have the habit of writing posts for beginners from time to time as I still remember those times when I was at the beginning and how I appreciated when someone with more experience took the time to explain things to us. Yesterday I wrote a Shoutout To New Users - Voting Witnesses And Proposals Is Important! Today I'd like to write about what staking means here. Staking is an important topic but many don't understand or don't care about it. This post is for beginners, so I'm going to make it as simple and explicit as possible.

Onboarding

I'm going to start at the beginning, with onboarding. There are organized onboarding campaigns on different social media platforms and there are those conducted by individual users. Now it's easy as we have a referral link available thanks to PeakD. You just share your post on another platform and if you're lucky, someone may register with your link. Easy peasy, right?

The truth is, onboarding new users may be easy but keeping them active on the platform for a longer period is not.

I suspect the most common reason people join Hive is the possibility of earning and that's what onboarders tell potential users when they are trying to convince them. What they possibly fail to mention is that Hive is not like any other social media platform and if you want to earn, you need to work hard and also invest and when I'm talking about investment, I'm referring to time and earnings, not fiat. Obviously you can invest fiat as well if you want.

Staking

Before I get to staking, let me mention two ways of earning on Hive, which are posting and curating. At the beginning, if you don't invest fiat or other currency on Hive, your only way of earning is by posting. Posting rewards are paid after 7 days and you get half as Hove Power (HP) and the second half in HDB (at the moment of writing). Translated in plain English this means half of your earnings are powered up and become stake, the other half is liquid, which means you can do whatever you want with it. You can convert it to Hive and power it up, build your stake with it or send it to the market and sell it.

Why Staking

I remember when I was at the beginning, how happy I was when I got an upvote of $0.2 or $0.3 and how I envied those who already had a considerable stake. That was a huge upvote, compared to the $0.02, what I usually was getting. I knew I have to work hard to get where these users were at that time and I did.

What you as a new user have to understand is that getting a big upvote from someone is possible because that user has staked their earnings or invested fiat or other cryptocurrency on Hive. Without staking your vote value worth nothing.

History has the habit of repeating itself, so let me tell you a story about some greedy people. When the first tokens appeared on the old chain, the most important at that time was PAL, and the size of the airdrop/ user was determined based on the user's stake. After the airdrop happened, there were plenty who jumped to sell their airdrop. Little did they know about what's going to happen next. The second airdrop was from Leo if I'm not mistaken and the size of the airdrop was based on your staked PAL tokens. Those who sold their PAL tokens learned the hard way that this place is not a get rich quickly type of place.

I've been working hard to get where I am now, not that I have a considerable stake but still, I'm happy when I can cast my vote and reward good content with my stake. That is possible because I have powered up everything I've earned here.

source

It's Time For A Change

There are many type of users, which is a huge advantage. One type is made of those who can only see the immediate gain, no matter how small it is. You see them starting out with the same behavior you see on the other platforms, where content is not rewarded and no one cares about copyright. You can post whatever you want, without being forced to source what's not yours.

These users are jumping in both feet hoping to get paid for what they have been doing on other platforms and get paid for it. Then they find out the hard way that that kind of behavior is not tolerated on Hive. Hive is not a milking cow, this is a community that we have been building for four years now and we are where we are because of those who have been staking their earnings and investing fiat in the platform to grow.

How many times I've seen people saying it's their earning, they do what they want with it. This is true, you can do whatever you want with your stake, power down, cash out, it's your right. However, if you want a future on the platform for yourself, that's not the way to build it. Cashing out everything is the fastest way to nowhere. You get a few pennies every day and that's it. Needless to say those who are investing their earnings and fiat are not eager to support those who are not making any sacrifice to contribute to building this place.

F.B. Hawley said that profit is a reward for risk taken in business. Those who are investing in the platform are taking a risk as no one knows what's going to happen. Price is fluctuating, but they have faith in the platform and thinking long term. Over the years the community has proven to the world that we are here to build something amazing. It's time for a change, it's time to drop the old mentality. It's up to you which way you want to go.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta