Second Hive meetup; PowerUp & How to || important information for all hive users old and new
Better late than never, as they say. I have been swamped with school work of late. Due to that I have not been able to post as consistently as I wanted to. I had this in mind to share with you for the past 3 days now as we had the meetup (our second one) on Sunday. In fact, while the meeting was ongoing online, I was in a school project group discussion so my attention was divided. I had to switch my attention between the two meetings every now and then because I couldn’t have missed the school project meeting, and the areas of discussion in the Hive meetup to were equally as important to learn.
Hold tight buddy, I will be sharing all the gist with you in a jiffy.
Of course the moderators of the meetup were the honorable members @mcsamm and @collinz as they’re OGs on this platform from our country Ghana 🇬🇭. So in effect they’re what we would call our “country representatives”, and they have been doing the most.
In attendance to the meeting were myself, med, Zology, Ben, Collins, and mcsamm.
Main reason why I couldn’t leave the meeting was the importance of the topics of discussion. Some of which were; Keys, transactions, postings, hive frontends, other hive dapps(threespeak, hivengine, hive.io, etc), and power ups.
Hive private keys
Our hive keys are the primary most basic and most important and delicate feature of our hive accounts. Our keys are meant to be treated and taken care of as if they’re the only keys to the vault or a goldmine. Yeah, we need to keep them in that high regard.
Our hive accounts are made of a set of four or more very important keys called public and private keys. The public keys are not needed to log into your hive account. It is the private keys that are most essential to the account. A lost of your private keys is tantamount to the lost of your hive account.
- Especially the master key, which is used to generate all the other keys.
- The private owner key is used reset all the other private keys (the private posting key, the private active key, and the private memo key).
- The private posting key is the one they should always use to log in to their hive account with if they are only going to make posts and interact on the hive platform without making any monetary transactions.
- It is the private active key that is responsible for performing all sorts of transactions on the hive blockchain platform. Transactions such as; transfer of tokens, power up and down, and all other wallet related and monetary transactions in your account. This particular key is NOT to be shared with anybody.
All the private keys are not to be shared with anyone but more emphasis is on the private active key as a compromise of this key can result in wallet access and monetary losses.
- Last but not the least is the memo key. The memo key is used to view and decrypt messages on private transactions, called transaction memos.
All the private keys are advised to be stored offline in a very secured location. They are not to be stored online as they would be susceptible to compromise.
Postings
Photo by Plann from Pexels
We also discussed about how and where to make your posts. As the first meetup focused on avoiding plagiarism and sharing original content, in the aspect of posting, the second meetup discussion focused more on how and where to make these original posts. They highlighted various niche communities. As an individual this is what you need to do. Select a few communities and establish yourself there.
Post consistently and don’t just drop your post and leave the community or the platform. Imagine sacrificing time and energy to write a post and then you have just come online to drop it and you came back hours later just to realize there has been no interactions on your post. This is how it would have been like if everybody just came online to drop their posts and leaving. You don’t like it so don’t do it. Try and interact on your niche community members’ posts. That’s how you build your following, relationships, and gain recognition.
Select a few communities and be active there because you cannot be everywhere.
Hive frontends
We discussed about Ecency, peakd, and leofinace but I personally use only Ecency and Leofinance.
Ecency
Did you know that with Ecency you can use as much as 10 tags on your post? That right, Ecency allows you to use that much tags. With Ecency you get rewarded for being active or interactive. All your activities on the platform attracts you some rewards in the form of Ecency points. Voting on posts, reblogging posts, commenting or replying to posts, when you use the app to delegate HP to someone get you an amount of points everyday, using the app to post your content also attracts you some points, just signing on to the app daily you get some points. Doing pretty much any activity or interaction on the app earns you rewards.
- You can use these points promote your posts or boost your posts to reach more audience.
- You can also use these point to tip someone in the form of a reward to them on their post.
I would recommend this hive front end to every newbie on hive.
Peakd
I have personally not explored this hive frontends before but from our discussions I understood there are tribe tokens that are also earned from using this particular frontend too.
Also from my understanding this frontend also allows one to use as much as 10 tags on their post.
LeoFinance
Leofinance is a standalone project built on the hive blockchain. It’s a community that deals solely with finance and crypto content. Leofinance also has rewards in tribe tokens. Moreover, posting content using the leofinance frontend allows one to use as much as 11 tags on their posts.
Threespeak
Threespeak is a web3 version of YouTube, to put it most basically. It is a video content platform built on the hive blockchain. This app, like all decentralized blockchain social apps, gives respect to creators and allows viewers to reward creators on the spot on their content. It works exactly like the hive decentralized social app but in this case the content is in a video form. This gives the opportunity to video content creators to benefit from the hive platform and not just only bloggers.
Threespeak is also a community on the mother hive social dapp the deals with only video content. It won’t be long until this app takes over the centralized video content applications.
Also, posting on Threespeak allows for the usage of as much as 15 tags.
All these apps can be signed in using your hive username and keys.
Power Up
We discussed the importance of powering up one’s Hive. It is a good thing for both the individual and the platform as well at the same time.
Powering up one’s Hive increases one’s voting power, and also increases one’s reputation on the platform. Reputation here does not mean the number beside one’s username, but reputation in the sense that one gains more recognition.
Powering up one Hive says a lot about the person’s long terms goals on the platform. It also shows how a persons trusts and believes in the great potential of the platform. If you really see potential in this platform then best best way to show it is to accumulate more and more Hive power.
Powering up one’s Hive helps to drive the value of Hive in a good direction. As powering up one’s Hive helps to lockdown an amount of Hive and reduces the total circulation supply of Hive, this makes Hive a little bit more scarce in the market. Everybody knows the demand and supply rules. As the supply is reduced the value goes up, even at a constant demand as long as the circulation supply is reduced.
So everybody is entreated to develop the habit of powering up their Hive. Not necessarily everything but at the least(if you cannot do it at all, do this) make sure you power up not less than 20% of all your payouts.
How to power up your Hive
Below is a simple step by step outline of how to power up your Hive into Hive Power(HP).
- First of all you make sure you’re signed in to your hiveblog account with your active key. If you’re not signed in with your active key then you would have to do that.
- Your post payout normally comes in Hive Backed Dollard(HBD) so you would have to convert it to Hive first before you can proceed with the power up.
- You convert your HBD to Hive by tapping on the drop icon beside the HBD amount to open the drop down menu and select market.
- It brings you to a “market place” for you to buy Hive with your HBD. Under “BUY HIVE”, enter the amount (in HBD) that you want to buy Hive and tap on the “BUY HIVE” button.
- The next prompt will ask you to confirm your transaction. Tap on “OK”.
- In a few seconds a prompt will appear showing you the confirmation of your order.(your order to buy Hive).
- Go back to your wallet (signed in with your active key) you’ll see that the HBD amount you used to buy the Hive would have been debited.
- In a few seconds your Hive account would be credited with the amount you have bought.
- Now (make sure you’re still signed in with your active key) tap on the drop down icon next to your Hive amount to open the drop down menu and select “Power Up”.
- Enter the amount of Hive you want to power up and tap on “Power Up”.
- Tap “OK” to confirm the transaction.
- Now you see that your Hive Power will be credited with the amount you have powered up.
Note: Do be aware than you can power down this hive anytime you’re in need of it. Powering up your hive doesn’t mean your losing it. It is still yours. You can follow a similar process to retrieve your HBD from your Hive Power. *It is worth noting that whereas power up process takes seconds, a power down process takes a total of 13 weeks for the total amount of Hive you initiated to power down to fully convert to HBD. However, the amount of Hive you initiated the power down for will come in weekly for 13 weeks period (you will receive 1/13 of your power down amount weekly over 13 weeks period).
Other Hive Dapps
We explored the hive-engine platform. Among many other functions you can use the hive engine to create your own cryptocurrency and smart contracts. How cool is that! We didn’t really go deep into it.
You can also sign in to the hive engine platform with your hive username and privates keys(or using hive keychain). Here you see another side of your hive wallet. Did you know that as people interact with your posts in the form of votes and comments somehow you get other hive tokens ?(I think they come in the form of a tip) These are called tribe tokens. These are tokens built on the hive blockchain. Unfortunately I have not had any tribe token, but I learned about them.
To sign in using hive keychain one would have to download it from the store. I downloaded mine front when AppStore(for iOS).
Hive keychain
After downloading the keychain app you of course need to sign in with your active key.
- When you choose to sign in with “Existing account”; that’ll be your existing hive account.
- Then you set a PIN for your keychain app to add an extra layer of security to it.
- From here you enter your hive username and private active key to sign in. Enter them and tap import to import your hive wallet information to the keychain app to sign in.
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Vwalaa!! You’re in.
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On the top right there is the “reward center” icon, the “Hive Auth” icon, the “QR Code” icon, and the “menu” icon which opens your profile menu and other settings. Do explore it and have a feel of it.
In your hive engine(through the keychain app) you’ll find your resource credit percentage, your voting power percentage, your tribe tokens(“token”) and the history your transactions in hive engine(if you claimed any token before or transacted or swapped tokens they’ll appear at history).
Overall you can see the reason why I didn’t want to miss out on this meetup. The information we shared and discussed were just endless. I hope you weren’t bored with a long write up. Let me tell you something. I have taken the pain to create this write up for you use it as a resource material. I believe you’ll come back to this post later on to learn or remind yourself or one or two things.
Hive is the future!
We ended the meeting by encouraging and entreating one another to do more power ups as the hive platform has great potential. There are currently over one hundred standard use case projects built on the hive blockchain. Hiveprojects.io has a list of all these projects. A significant growth of each one of these over hundred project has a direct impact on hive; Hive will follow suit. So imagine the chances! This tells you that hive is set for great things. The future is very bright for hive. There is so much growth potential. 😊
