Hello everybody on HIVE! I hope your 2023 has got off to a good start? My name is Jasper and I’m writing to you from Cape Town, South Africa!
I see that a lot of people are trying to set goals for their HIVE accounts in 2023, which is great. I think it is very hard to commit to something, or a vision, without putting it on “paper” first… so let me give it a try.
Some background - My 2022 on HIVE:
I started my HIVE journey by signing up in April 2022. It took me a while to get going, but I found my two major niches were:
•Music – I write songs, sing and play guitar and harmonica and whatever other instruments I can find or even make really. I can either perform on my own, or as a duo with fellow Hiver 
Not just guitar and vocals! Haha!
•Surfing – Some fellow surfers/bodyboarders, mainly absolute chargers from Brazil, have started the “SurfHive” Community, and so I like to take an action camera when I go surfing and write about that. Cape Town has a myriad of beautiful surf spots, as does the rest of South Africa’s coastline.
Taking video with a camera in my mouth while surfing in the Garden Route (South Coast) of South Africa last week...
In addition to this, I tend to post about my career as a renewable energy developer, South Africa’s energy challenges, my beautiful pet cats and whatever else comes to mind.
Checking out an existing wind farm with colleagues before exploring for more potential sites to develop!
Bunny (white) and Mr. Pickles (brown) getting roped into a music video!
GOALS for 2023
•Write New Songs – I try to contribute to Three Tune Tuesday every week and make sure the third song is an original song. After about 19 weeks, I am close to running out of songs I have already written, and I need to find new ways to create more songs – even if it means new tunings for the guitar, or new instruments altogether, to inspire me! Basically, I would like to become more childlike with how I create and play around with music!
•Surf New Waves – If I’m not careful, my surf posts could become pictures of the same old few spots that I know well, so I would like to explore and try new spots and be a bit more childlike with that too! At least one new spot (for me) per month – anything from well known waves I haven’t tried yet for some reason (mostly out of town), to my own discoveries like I managed to find on the Garden Route of South Africa this month! The few other surfers on the SurfHive Community seem to be very good and brave chargers, so let me raise my game and hopefully help this little niche community grow!
•Interaction – I post regularly, but where I personally think I fell short in 2022 is making friends in communities and commenting on other people’s posts. I need to make a bit of time to dedicate to this, even if it’s just one hour per week, and would very much like to spend it on Hive Open Mic and Hive Music Festival posts more than I currently do.
•HP growth – Currently I am trying to fast-track my growth in staked HP by choosing to get my post rewards in 100% HP. I am trying to get to dolphin status (about 5500HP) as quickly as possible. Based on my growth in 2022 (I am over 2900HP now) I think I can get to dolphin by the end of June 2023.
•HBD growth – I haven’t been focusing on HBD at all. Typically, the value of HIVE/HP has been decreasing pretty constantly since I have joined HIVE, and so it has always felt like HP are getting “cheaper” than usual, and that it’s a good time to spend any HBD I may have on acquiring staked HP. Once I become a dolphin, I may then choose to get my post rewards in the default way (50% HP and 50% HBD) OR I may choose to speculate and trade one for the other depending on the HIVE price… I would love your comments on how I should go about this?
oWhat price would you sell saved HBD to become more staked HP? I have done this recently, and I am thinking something like whenever HIVE is worth less than $0.30?
oWhat price would you sell HIVE/HP to become more HBD? I am thinking whenever HIVE is worth more than $0.80 or even $1?
SOME Mental Gymnastics to ponder!
IF the HIVE price stayed the same throughout a year, and if (haha!) I suddenly had enough spare cash to buy the equivalent of an extra 5500HP today (another dolphin account in value):
•If I put it all into extra HP for my account, to raise my staked HP by 5500HP, I think it would raise my curation rewards per week by about 10HP, or roughly 520-550HP by a year later. (When I first became a minnow with 550HP, it was about the first time I was starting to make 1HP per week via curation. Now that I’m about 5 times that, I seem to be making 5HP per week via curation, so I think it’s a valid estimate.)
•However, if I put the equivalent of 5500HP into saved HBD with 20% interest. Then it should grow by 1100HP by the end of a year. You could then throw some of that back into staked HP at a time when HIVE is “relatively cheap” and keep the rest…
Of course, the HIVE price does not stay constant! Since I joined HIVE, it has decreased from about $0.80 to less than $0.30. I believe the HIVE stock is largely connected to mining Bitcoin, and whether or not we see a recovery will depend on whether Bitcoin recovers and when?
What is interesting to me, is if I go to https://hivebuzz.me/ranking, and order the accounts by “Value ($)”, I see that very few of the top accounts are prioritizing the “Saved HBD with 20% APR interest rate” route, which seems strange as that’s a very good return on a token that does a good job of staying tied to the dollar as far as I’ve seen in the last 8 months? I assume this is because there is a lot of faith in HIVE increasing substantially in value in the future and making that 20% growth look like lunch money? Can anybody enlighten me?
Another thing that is interesting... if you want your upvote on other peoples' posts to count more than ZAR1.50 ($0.10), then you're going to have to be at least a dolphin. There are less than 2000 accounts of dolphin and above, and a lot of those are inactive, so it's actually a very small number of accounts that are providing the good upvotes, that we all need, around the world... I would like to become one of those people that are spreading the love, because it's not all about me. South Africa is struggling economically, but many people on HIVE come from countries that have even worse economic situations, and earning a little bit extra on HIVE can really make a big difference in their ability to make ends meet! This is another reason why I'm trying to reach at least dolphin status as quickly as possible.
With that said, I’m going to stick to focusing 100% on staked HP for my rewards, and getting to dolphin status as fast as possible over the next 5-6 months, and only then may I adjust my strategy, so I have some time to think this all through!
I'd love to hear your comments!
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