PREAMBLE
Hive is confusing. Hive has so many pieces Hive has no user manual Hive can change the world ....or collapse to nothing
I wanted to make a quick primer on how to use hive and it got long, REALLY long.
I've missed lots of things, left out things I want to put in, don't know things I wish I did, but this is my attempt to give some insight on how to get started, why you should get started, and things you can do once you have started.
Good luck and please leave questions or comments
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Why bother with Hive
- How to start
- Save your passwords
- Prepare to make content (or skip to step 9 and deposit funds)
- Find your place
- A few tips
- Make some money
- Withdraw, Deposit, Swap coins
Introduction
It could be said that I've been a member of HIVE since before it was even called HIVE. I started a STEEM account a long time ago. The promise to get paid for writing articles seemed awesome! However, I couldn't quite figure out the whole way of doing things and gave up after a day or two.
(image stolen from the internet--not my image)
Fast forward a few years and I joined this game called Splinterlands with the promise of making money (which I love) by playing a card game (which I really love). Count me in!
Along the way I've made many many mistakes. I've been confused. I've been frustrated. I've hunted for answers and more times than not haven't found them as Google won't help you (usually). I've also made some happy mistakes and learned along the way.
I'm posting this today in the hope that new members can learn from my many many mistakes and maybe make the learning curve less steep for anyone who happens to read it.
First: Why would you bother with HIVE?
There are some very good social media apps out there. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and many many others I'm sure. So why would you bother with HIVE? It's clunky, confusing, and the opposite of user friendly.... User hostile perhaps?
If there was one thing I could magically do for Hive it would be to make an easy to use manual on how it works.
However, there are three good reasons to join the community.
- You can make money from your posts regardless where you live.
- There are way fewer trolls and negative comments left so easier to make friends
- Your content is your own. Won't be deleted by corporate office if it offends someone
For myself. I started here because of a game where I met my guild friends. I stayed because I can keep a blog of things that are important to me without worrying that it will get deleted. That's important to me because I'm a Christian and my views are increasingly become unacceptable in current culture. ** I don't want to be cancelled because of what I believe. **
However, most people I tell about HIVE are more interested when I say that there is money to be made using HIVE and posting on social media.
Second: How do you start with HIVE?
signup.hive.io is one place to start looking.
There are lots of options to start with Hive. Some cost money and some don't. The reason? Some use HIVE tokens to create an account (costs money) and others use Resource Credits to create an account (free but only big account holders can do this and only a limited number of times daily). More on HIVE and Resouce Credits (RC) later.
hiveonboard.com is another great place to start
Personally I made an account by buying a spellbook in the Splinterlands game. At that time I thought I was making a game account and didn't realize that the username and passwords were the same across ALL the different HIVE based sites.
See 
PeakD sent me to 3speak to open an account (tergan). I tried to use it to verify my tergan604 account and everything went badly.
Please don't make the same mistake that I did!
Register for only ONE account.
DON'T register for one account per website!
Whether you get your account through 3speak, ecency, hivedex, hivewallet, actifit, blocktrades, splinterlands, or any other hive onboarding site your username and password will work on ALL the different HIVE based sites.
Third: Save your passwords!
I don't have my username for my STEEM account anymore. Even if I did I wouldn't have the password. As a result there is no chance that I will ever be able to access what I wrote before and never be able to claim the few coin I have there.
With my HIVE accounts I made sure to print my codes and lock them in a safety deposit box. I made a file with the codes and put them on a USB Drive which I keep in my home safe. I also have a Hivesigner app which keeps my codes on my computer.
SAVE YOUR PASSWORDS!
Now I just mentioned Hivesigner. It is so very useful and I would say its a must have. It is a browser add on that you really don't want to live without.
Why use Hivesigner? Because your passwords are LONG and there are FOUR of them. Well, four private and four public so I guess eight of them. Here are some sample passwords. They start with STMxxxxxxxxxxx
The keys give increasing amounts of control over the account. From Memo key which gives very little control. Posting which allows posting messages. Active key which gives the ability to move funds. Owner key which gives the ability to change password.
This is important!
You could give someone the ability to post on your behalf but your funds would be safe.
You could give someone the ability to move your money, but you could change the password and lock them out if they proved untrustworthy.
It's not like other sites where if someone hacks your password your account is compromised and you can't get it back. Assuming you don't lose your Owner key that is.
Fourth: Prepare to do some work (or skip to the end on how to deposit funds)
Okay. If you have made it this far you now have a hive username, hive password and no clue what to do with it. And to be honest you can't do very much with a brand new account. However, not much is not nothing!
Here is a snapshot of a friends account who started, got discouraged, and gave up.
That picture is loaded with information and you can head over to hiveblocks.com to find it for ANY users on the system.
On the top right you see the money in the account. Hive money is called HIVE not very imaginative but it works 😁 Hive money can be spent to make new accounts (currently costs 3 HIVE to make an account). Or you can transfer the money to other users to pay for stuff. Or go to the currency exchange (hive-engine or tribaldex) to trade it for bitcoin, ethereum, or other cryptocurrencies (useful if you are going to move to an exchange to cashout but more on that later). I gave 
HIVE can also be staked to show you are locked in your coin to use the system. Hive that is locked in is called Hive Power or HP for short. You can get your HP back as Hive but the process takes 13 weeks. Her HP is sitting at 0.000. Now with no HP locked in that gives her very little use of the HIVE system.
Why little use of the system? HP determines the Resource Credits (RC) available. RC are used for every transaction, every post, every like on the system. Why? The Hive system doesn't let everyone do everything as much as they like. There is a limited amount of space on the servers. A limited amount of processing power on those servers. A limited amount of bandwidth going to those servers also. How does the system determine who gets access to those computer resources? With resource credits! The more HIVE you lock into the system the more access you have to it. So, if you are a rich hive user who has locked substantial money into the system you get a lot of usage on the system. If you are a new user who has put nothing into the system you get virtually no access to the system!
That is SUPER important and honestly an AWESOME idea!
It is important because
Now you may think "I hate being restricted and want to post everything". However, those resource credits being limited is important--because it helps to stop trolls and flamers from being a nuisance on the system. No-one can go into every posting area and post garbage unless they are willing to pay into the system. No unlimited free spam accounts for unlimited garbage posts.
I love not having spam and trolls being a major factor in hive
Your posts cost you. They are limited. So make them count!
Finally you will notice the HBD on the account balance sheet. Mamalen doesn't have any of those. HBD is super special on hive. Why? Because cryptocurrencies like Hive go up and down like a yo-yo. HBD is based on the American Dollar with 1 HBD able to be traded for 1 USD worth of HIVE tokens. Important because if you are saving up for a real world item (like a cellphone) which costs a real world amount in USD then you can use the HBD to know how close you are.
Note though. HBD cannot be traded directly. It takes time to convert them back into HIVE (which you can spend). It is not guaranteed to be exactly $1 USD. It also doesn't give you any Resource Credits to use on the system. You CAN put them into Hive Savings which gives you a nice 20% interest at the moment!
Just for fun I'll show you another friends account. Well, actually my boss in the Splinterlands guild but she's an awesome long time Hive user. @Saffisara
*Note to Saffi if you read this. I bring you up a lot in my posts because I think your an awesome HIVE role model. If you want me to use someone else let me know 😉
comes to mind. Or maybe 
*
And here is the account of a 'Witness'. Witnesses are the people who run the whole Hive system. Every user has the option to vote for who runs the system with their HP. However, big users like 
Side note: whales and users with lots of RC can convert those RC into account tokens. Since RC replenish daily for free that means that large users can make an unlimited amount of free accounts over time as their RC recharge. Smaller users can make unlimited accounts by paying 3 Hive per account. That's why some sites charge for accounts and some give them out for free (in limited numbers per day)
My splinterlands account has almost 900 HP which doesn't give me nearly enough RC to make a free account. I've tried but not enough RC.
Ahh... but I got sidetracked.
As a new user you have 0 HIVE, 0 HP, 0 HBD and virtually 0 RC.
You can buy Hive... but it can be a bit of a process. Actually a big pain in the butt unless you are into crypto and know how to move it around. However, skip to the end if you want to see how to deposit crypto.
Or you can earn Hive... Which is what I'm doing with this account. I started with exactly nothing about a month ago and now have about $9 USD. Sure its not much but considering it came from nothing I'm pretty proud of that.
Fifth. How to work for those Hive/HP/HBD and RC
I'm going to assume most new users want to make money without paying anything. I'll start with that.
At its core HIVE works on the concept that if you post good content you will get rewarded with HIVE tokens.
Or Write good posts = Get money.
In practice it is a lot harder than that. The reason is that it is the people who use Hive and have RC staked get to determine what a good post is by clicking 'like' on your post. Attracting people to read your post and like it is a huge challenge. It's especially difficult for a person like who is not charismatic and isn't great at making interesting posts (like me)
How you meet people and find your niche is entirely up to you. However I'll tell you my strategy and if you can use it for yourself then great.
A. Find a community/tribe/branch that you are interested in
Now I mentioned community/tribe/branch. I'm sure that I'll get the actual names wrong but there is a diverse bunch of people on the hive chain.
I got started on my main account with Splinterlands which is a great card game. It's been wonderful for me. I wouldn't recommend it as a starting point because its expensive (need to buy $10 spellbook), expensive (need to buy cards), and there is a steep learning curve to figure out how to convert the in game money to hive. However, its loads of fun and c'mon making money from gaming is awesome 😁
For my free account I decided to start with Actifit. Actifit is an app that you run on your phone. Reach 10,000 steps in a day and you can post a basic report and get rewarded with HIVE tokens. Since I am not a great writer this was awesome for me.
On the downside here's the results from my first post.
It was worth a total of 0.05 Hive and my cut was only half of that. Literallly I was just giving my two hive cents worth.
Or if you like making blog posts I would strongly suggest joining Ecency which is where I'm posting this.
There are lots of communities, or you could even start your own for 3 Hive. However, when new I would start out with a large community that deals in something you like.
Or if you want to post video's then try 3speak.
leofinance.io for the business minded.
peakd as an ecency alternative
and there are many many others but those are the ones I know the best.
after you find a community then:
B. Read the rules of that community
Okay. I've been guilty in this department. I started in #MarketFriday and wrote what I thought was a good post. However, I missed a few of the rules of the community and 
C. Introduce yourself to the community
Some communities require it. Some do not. Some require that you get an invite on Discord. Others just require you to play the game or use the app. Regardless of what community you are in I would still recommend an introduction so other people know who you are what you are about.
D. Plan what you want to talk about and get in the habit of making regular content
Good regular content is a good way to get you noticed. If you post only once don't expect anyone to care what you have to say. If you post regularly, people begin to know you, and you have good content people will take notice. Although it may take a while. Things do not happen over night.
Side note: Try to use images. Plain text gets pretty boring. Using at least ONE image is also really important. The first image in your post goes beside your title on the news feed. If there is no image then your title looks very bland in the news feed.
IF you can learn to use html code that's awesome. The default text editor varies from platform to platform. Actifit is really basic. Ecency is much better allowing for bold, italic, headers, quotes, bullet points and so on. However, if you learn actual HTML codes you can make it look even better still.
Look for any Hive post with an image to one side with text beside it (not on top or underneath) ... that's something that looks nice and also shows that person knows HTML. Not required but refreshing 😊
E. USE YOUR OWN CONTENT! Plagarism, copy and paste, posting someone else's content, reposting your old content are all going to get you downvoted so far you'll never see light again
Again, I've been guilty of stealing clip art on occasion and I've gotten ideas from other people. A minor slip may not get caught but outright copyright fraud, plagiarism, using AI to make you post, stealing other peoples work, images or music is a sure way to get downvoted to oblivion. Please don't do it.
F. Interact with other people in the community.
Everyone wants to be appreciated. Writing a USEFUL comment is a great way to engage with the community.
However, short one liners like "great post", "really liked that", "wow. want more" aren't really going to get very far. Detailed comments with specific information which is constructive or complementary are probably going to be a lot more useful.
Then again, I'm still a noob so take that into consideration.
G. Reputation and Image counts
Versus
Now I'm no expert at making the profile picture and banner, however just so you know where to start.
That will bring up this menu where you choose "Settings"
And there you go. You click the upload image and you and import an image from your computer. Unfortunately if the image is the wrong size then you may not get the desired outcome. It may end up a little off center like this.
H. Use the tagline, use hashtags and mention people in your post
Okay. I'm terrible at this. Honestly I don't know what tags to use, what hashtags to use or who to mention. I will say that by mentioning Saffi earlier she will see my post. If you mention someone they will see your mention in their feed. With the #MarketFriday that will let
If anyone wants to comment on how to use the tagline and hashtags properly I'd be very very grateful.
SIX. A few tips getting started
Okay.
*You have found a community you want to get involved in.
*You have setup your profile picture and banner to make yourself look pretty
*You have made an introductory post so people can learn a little about you and say hi.
But you still have virtually no Resource Credits to post with. That means you can't say hi to everyone. That means you may not even have enough RC to make a regular post. In short you are hamstrung!
Now you could head over to the giftgiver faucet and get some free coin.
They are awesome people dedicated to giving HP to new users. Unfortunately HP and Hive aren't free so they can only give a tiny sliver or coin twice daily at one hour intervals. Still something is better than nothing when starting out!
However, I chose to start with Actifit.io
As long as I made even a basic post everyday the actifit crew would come by and give it an upvote. That may not seem like much but it was SUPER important and here is why.....
When I click it I get this image :
If you look at the vote from 
So, every post I make with 10,000 steps I'm getting a few pennies. Sure its not much but it adds to my RC over time so I can do more if I persevere in the beginning stages.
More importantly if someone with HIGHER reputation than you upvotes your post then YOUR reputation goes up! I started with a 25 reputation and I'm now close to 50. Why? Because Actifit regularly upvotes me, horray 😉
If you can find a community where regular activity is regularly upvoted by a high reputation leader that will be a huge boost to your reputation and give you a steady, albeit small, stream of income.
To get a quick, one-time boost to your account balance you may want to look at
Now I'm still trying to wrap my head around how exactly waivio works but as I understand it you perform a task and get a reward. Eat at a restaurant listed, post about your experience and get a reward. One starter task is to take a photo of your favorite coffee mug and tell why it is your favorite.
That task gives you a nice $5 boost to your account. Sort of 😉
As with all things HIVE the $5 has a learning curve associated with it. They pay out in WAIV tokens so you will have to skip to the end and figure out how to swap them.
Of course, if you write a very good post and it gains recognition in the group you can get a post which is worth a fair amount of money. My first post in the #MarketFriday community got me this :
That one single post was worth the same as 160 posts on Actifit.
Now I wish I could say it was because of my wit and excellent writing skill. However, that would be a total lie. I used a combination of Actifit and Ecency to get noticed.
Here is how it worked.
I posted regularly on actifit daily for two weeks and built up just enough RC to make one good, detailed post with lots of pictures. I was proud of the content but really no one knew me in the community.
However, all that work in actifit and continually checking my account on Ecency earned me some Ecency coin.
You can see the coin I earned here :
Now the coin can't be spent directly which is a little sad. However, you can use it to call in the Ecency curator to take a look at your post. Or you can use the points to promote your post so it comes up top more often (I think)
Either way I made a post I was proud of. Used my Ecency points to ask the curator to look at it. IF the curator thinks it is a quality post they MIGHT give it an upvote. If they do your Ecency points are gone. If they don't you keep your points and try again.
In this case the Ecency curator DID like my post and give it an upvote. That got me noticed and got a lot of other people to give me a thumbs up also.
So a big thank you to 
There are other curators though. 
and 
Now I picked 
Curious how to get their attention? Check out their blog! Just put in their name in the search field and you can see all their posts.
@bdvoter/new-and-updated-guidelines-for-bdvoter
A 100% vote from
- thanks to
for pointing me to a new site hivetasks.com and pointing out an error in my math on voting value. edit made *
How does that work?
Voting Power!
Every vote you make uses up voting power and it slowly regenerates through the day. In fact 20% of the voting power regenerates over a 24hr period or so I have been told. The curators could make 20-100% votes or 200-10% votes and be back up to full power the next day.
If you check out my Voting Power you will see its right around the 80% level. I'm doing what I can to support other Actifit users by making sure that everyone who gets their 10,000 steps gets an upvote from he, although only a 7% vote. Why 7%? Well, its a large enough vote to count for some HP to the recipient and there are about 150 people post daily in Actifit and 7% * 150 is roughy equal to 20% of my voting mana.
How do I vote on everyone in the community? Check out hive.vote and 
Oops, I got sidetracked. I should have put a new header.
SEVEN. Making money!
There are a few ways to make money using Hive.
- Post Good content
- Curate Good content
- Delegate unused HP
- Earn interest on HP or HBD
- Use the trading system to buy low and sell high
- Add Liquidity to coins through use of liquidity pools
The first and only way when you start out with a name and no currency is by posting so...
A) Post Good content!
Having a curator take notice is really nice. Having a community give a lot of small upvotes is even nicer. Making friends in the community and having them enjoy your posts is the nicest of all IMHO 😃
However there are other ways.
B) Curate good posts
That just means upvoting other peoples posts. As I just mentioned you have a limited number of upvotes a day and when you have a low amount of RC your vote may not be worth anything unless its a 100% vote.
For example. If I was to upvote 
a 100% upvote gets about 1.2 hive cents in value. Half for the poster and HALF FOR ME. However, this is a post from 3 years ago and everything gets paid out after 7 days so an upvote now isn't very useful.
but my vote isn't fixed at 1.2 cents. If I vote on a post which gets very few votes then its worth much less.
If I was to upvote this post it would be only worth 0.6 cents.
Take home message. Upvoting GOOD posts gets you more rewards. Also you can upvote your OWN reports if you really want to. Not sure if the community is happy about it but you can do it.
C) Delegate your unused HP
If you have more HP than you need for resource credits to post you can delegate it to someone else. Now delegation may be a confusing concept but here it is in a nutshell.
This is 
With over 52,000 HP of his own he is no slouch in the power department. However, you can see others have delegated him over 85,000 HP so that his votes really pack a punch.
Why would anyone do that though? Well, there are rewards for curating content but FINDING good content is time consuming and not everyone has that time. If you delegate your HP to a curator they will often share some of the rewards back to the delegator.
Also, if you have a friend who is starting out you could delegate them some of your HP (or RC) so they can start posting right away instead of going the slow route of grinding for pennies. In that way you keep your money you are just lending them the use of it for a little while.
Delegating is actually quite simple. Just go to your wallet on your profile page. Click on your HP and a drop down list comes up with 'delegate' as an option.
Here are a list of people I'm delegating to:
Are they the best for return? No idea. Are they the best option? Again no idea. I haven't been able to find out which curators pay the most money back for the delegators. Trial and error I suppose.
Although if anyone knows a better resource please send me a comment.
Here is a sample of my rewards from delegating 10HP
If you look at my hive activity log you will notice that.
Some curators have minimum delegations to get rewarded. Others deal in currency other than HP and others just don't pay anything back as they use the power to help others not pay the delegators. If you choose to delegate do it wisely.
Also there are a few things you should know about delegations. These have screwed me over a couple of times.
If you take back your delegation you are waiting 6 days to get the HP back. Very sad.
There can only be one delegation at a time. I was delegating 100HP to a curator. I wanted to change it to 150HP so I clicked delegate 50HP. I thought it would add onto the original 100HP but no, it just gave the 50HP. Then I decided to re-enter for 150HP but found out that I screwed up.
When I went from 100 --> 50 the other 50HP was being returned to me and wouldn't be available for 6 days. I had to wait a week before I could change my delegation to the 150 that I wanted because I had to wait for my delegated HP to be returned before I could delegate it out again.
Now you will notice that I said that the 
**EIGHT Swap, Deposit, Withdraw coins
There are a load of different coins hiding out on the HIVE space. Remember I mentioned getting $5 worth of WAIV tokens earlier in the post? Anyone who wants to make their own coin can. In fact I made a coin a while back call GLD. Some coins do well, other coins fade to oblivion. With my GLD coin I like to think its in hibernation. It will have a use in the future but I'm still trying to figure it out.
But I digress...
When I curate to
You can get these in addition to getting HIVE coins by using these different communities. Then you can use them (AFIT can buy physical items), stake them (SPT can be staked for return), delegate them or sell them.
Typically I sell them to get more Hive and then convert to HP. However, you need to use additional HIVE sites to do this. The ones that I use are hive-engine.com and tribaldex.com. Both sites are super important to the hive experience and have way more features than any new user should have access to.
Personally I use each site for a different task.
*tribaldex.com I use to change tribe currencies into Hive
*hive-engine I use to change my hive into other cryptocurrencies so I can withdrawl them to my crypto.com VISA card. The hive-engine is also a two way street. I can use money or cryptocurrecy I have on my crypto.com VISA (or other crypto exchange) and transfer to my account on the hive-engine in order to buy HIVE.
Here's what those two tasks look like:
Converting tribe coin (LEO) to HIVE on tribaldex.com
Login to tribaldex using my usual hive username and password.
Click on the "Pools" tab
Click on the swap tab
My swap would look like this and there are a few details to notice.
I'm exchanging 5.969 Leo and getting roughly 0.6 SWAP.HIVE NOT Hive. I can exchange Swap.hive for regular hive by withdrawing it on the hive-engine.com. Maybe I could do it here but I am not sure how ..still learning myself.
Also notice there is slippage. The swap engine uses computer magic to make a trade but the larger your sell or buy order and the smaller the pool the more it will affect the price of the trade. Setting maximum slippage means you get a value closer to what you expect. That's also why it says that I should get a minimum of 0.5999 and also notice that there is a fee of 0.0015 hive to make the trade.
Where do those fees go? They go to anyone willing to put up both LEO and SWAP.HIVE to facilitate trades. That's done in a liquidity pool which is an awesome feature of tribaldex. It's also one that people make entire posts about and I won't touch on here. Just know it is one more way to make money using the hive system.
Now the swap system only works with currency pairs and there is not a pair for every type of currency. Let's look at LEO for example :
If you click on the Pools tab and search for LEO pools you will get this result:
Which mean I can transfer LEO into SWAP.HIVE, BEE, CENT, or ONEUP but any other tribe currencies and I'd have to make more than one swap. So, if I want to get AFIT tokens for Actifit and I only have LEO. 1st jump is LEO to Swap.Hive then Swap.Hive to AFIT and pay a fee each time.
If I wanted to do the same thing using hive-engine it would look a little different:
Again, start with the hive-engine page and login using my hive username and password :
as you can see there is the swap function which acts almost identical to tribaldex page. However there is also the market option which brings up a stock market type buy/sell list.
This gives you an exact buy and sell listing so you know exactly what you are going to pay (no slippage). Also good if you want to place an order and wait for the market to meet your price.
However, I mostly use hive-engine because it has the best DEPOSIT and WITHDRAWL option that I've found so far.
If you click on the deposit option you get a cryptocurrency address to deposit money into. Once deposited you get the swap version of that coin (add BTC and get Swap.BTC). That can then be swapped to Swap.Hive which can then be withdrawl to your hive address (
If you wish to withdraw money it works exactly in reverse. You convert your swap.hive to swap.btc (ltc, doge and so on) then enter your wallet address on exchange elsewhere and the currency gets taken out.
For hive it would look like this (wallet address is locked so you can misplace your coin)
Parting Thoughts
This was much longer than I wanted it to be.
It covered much less than I had hoped.
But hopefully you have an idea of how to get a username and password. How to find a community, make a good post, and understand a few terms. Maybe make a few bucks and a few friends along the way! Post to your blog if you want to save memories without anyone looking (although those are public for viewing).
I don't know where Hive will be in the future, but I'm going to keep on plugging along and maybe make a better tutorial in the future.
I would LOVE to get some comments on things I should add, remove, got wrong or were confusing so I can make better posts in the future.
Thanks for your time and making it to the end