Is HSBI a good delegate for HP for active content creators? It has good direct yields, boosts posts, and builds author reputation.
Sponsored into HSBI!
I recently entered - and won! - a sponsorship into HSBI - Hive Stake Based Income. It's not surprising that I hadn't heard of it before seeing 
So after entering, I decided to read about the program. I was pleasantly surprised with how well it seems catered to help me reach my current goals on Hive, which, through exploring HSBI, I've firmed into: reach 1440HP.
Active Income and Passive
Hive, at its core, allows people to get tokens in reward for their activity. This activity might be winning a match in Splinterlands, sharing a really good photograph of a duck with the right community, writing educational finance material for another community - or, voting on that photograph and essay. This is what's often called "active income" - you have to take some action in order to get the income.
Built on top of this are a lot of programs for using your tokens to get more tokens - usually by letting folk borrow the token in some way, and using it actively themselves. This is what's often called "passive income".
Passive income is often what folk want: making money off having money. It's often a big reason why folk seek active income; to get enough to have passive income for when they can't, or don't want to, get an active income.
But, making money that way requires having money, and a tolerance for losing money, too.
One thing that makes blockchain interesting is how it allows for a significant blurring between active and passive income: Your staked Hive generates a passive return, just for being staked, but is also part of calculating your rshares - the metric used to determine your curation weight and thus how much you can earn from curation - an active income.
Staking? Rshares?
To understand how HSBI fits into Hive’s ecosystem, it’s important to grasp a few core concepts. On Hive, everything revolves around Hive Power (HP). When you stake your HIVE tokens, they convert to Hive Power, which determines your influence on the platform. Your HP affects how much Resource Credits (RC) you have, which are required for blockchain actions like posting, commenting, and voting. It also governs your ability to earn curation rewards.
Curation rewards are the income you earn from upvoting other people’s content, but they aren’t equally accessible to everyone. The value of your upvote is determined by rshares, a calculation based on your HP and remaining voting power. Higher rshares mean your upvotes are worth more, both to the content creator and in terms of your curation income. However, if your rshares are too low—common for new users with minimal HP—your upvotes may not even register as a payout unless other large accounts also vote on the same content. This makes earning curation rewards challenging for new users.
Instead, most incoming content creators focus on posting rewards, which are split evenly between the author and curators. As the author, you receive 50% of the rewards for your post in a mix of HP and Hive Dollars (HBD). The remaining 50% goes to those who upvoted your content, incentivizing engagement from others. This system makes HP doubly important: it enables you to post by providing the necessary RC, and it governs the influence of your upvotes on others’ content.
For creators like me, who are still building their stake, the goal is to eventually have enough HP to make my upvotes independently meaningful. Until then, programs like HSBI provide an opportunity to grow posting rewards and increase visibility, which are critical steps toward achieving that goal.
HSBI, Passive Subsidies for Active Income
How does all this tie into HSBI?
HSBI is, as far as I've seen, the only program that allows you to use your money to increase your active income. The program is pretty simple: You accrue vote value based on how many "units" you have with HSBI, and then that vote value is delivered via votes on your posts. I'll get into some specifics about the numbers in a minute, but the general idea is that HSBI subsidies the active income a person gets from posting content, based on how many HSBI units they have.
HSBI units can be bought - for other people - or you can get more for yourself by delegating HP.
That HSBI units can only be bought as sponsorships is another thing that I haven't seen in any Hive project.
HSBI units are bought by sending 1 HIVE to the steembasicincome account, along with the name of who you want to receive the sponsorship as the memo. 1 HIVE is 1 subscription unit to HSBI. 1 subscription unit lasts forever: every time your pending vote value accrues to a certain threshold, you'll get a vote on your post.
You can also acquire 1 bonus unit by delegating 2 HP to the same steembasicincome account. These last as long as the delegation lasts.
The more units an account has, the more rapidly their pending vote value accrues, leading to more frequent and/or larger votes on their posts, effectively setting a minimum income they can get from posting.
Building Hive Stake without Capital
As an incoming content creator, I'm keen to build my Hive Power. Doing so helps me support the communities I want supporting me, it's as simple as that. For lots of folk, building their HP is as simple as purchasing HIVE with their bank card and staking it. For others, regulations make transferring existing assets into the network impossible, so whatever they want to have on Hive, they have to get from Hive.
For us, that means posting. But building a stake from posting can be slow. It should be kind of slow - there's only so much value a single post can bring to the network. But it shouldn't be a grind.
One way to gain more is by participating in curation. But there's an issue: without a lot of Hive Power, a person's votes aren't worth very much. To receive curation rewards, they'll have to curate content that's going to get curated by other big accounts. This means there's a pressure to vote on trending content, and content that is likely to trend. And there's no real way to vote for what you actually find interesting, unless it lines up with those trends!
This means the activity the person is getting an income from isn't really curating, as much as using their vote weight as a bet on what content will trend. I guess you might call it speculative curation.
The goal should be - and my goal is - to get enough Hive Power that my vote alone is enough to cause a payout on the post or comment. Currently, that's 1400 HP. In the meantime, I can do "speculative curation," but... I'd rather not, honestly. I have real concerns about Hive's ability to be used by folk who aren't already on the platform, and voting weight being captured by speculation and curation trails are part of that.
So the question is, what to do with my "extra" HP, on that journey from 20 to 1440? One answer might be, delegate it to HSBI. This, in effect, temporarily converts it to HSBI units at a rate of 2:1.
Calculating HSBI's Raw Value
To understand if this is a valuable use of HP, I need some understanding of what I'll get in exchange. Calculations of this sort can be exceptionally complex, so I go into this expecting my answer to be some amount of wrong, and I assume it's going to be too high. This consistent lean toward conservative estimates helps ensure that I'm more likely to end up with more than I expected, not disappointed I got less than I wanted.
The HSBI website explains that $3 worth of HSBI units generates a vote worth $0.021 once a week, while $20 leads to a vote of the same value once a day. Since a vote is triggered when the pending value reaches $0.063—three times the vote value—we can calculate the daily accrual rate for HSBI units. For $3 of units, $0.063 accrues over 7 days, giving a daily accrual rate of $0.009. For $20 of units, $0.063 accrues in just one day, resulting in a daily accrual rate of $0.063. Dividing $0.009 by 3 (for $3 worth of units) gives a daily accrual rate per dollar of $0.003. For $20 of units, dividing $0.063 by 20 gives a slightly higher daily accrual rate per dollar of $0.00315. To stay conservative, we'll use the lower figure of $0.003 per dollar.
Since 1 HSBI unit is purchased with 1 HIVE, equivalent to $0.33 at current prices, this accrual rate translates to $0.003 × $0.33 = $0.00099 per day per unit. With 1 unit needing 2 HP to lease, the daily vote value per HIVE delegated becomes $0.000495. As the author—the recipient of the vote—I will receive half of that value, with the curators receiving the other half. This means I will get $0.0002475 per day per HIVE delegated. Over the course of the year, that comes to $0.0903375.
This works out to $0.0903375 per HIVE delegated annually, which translates to a 27.37% return on a $0.33 staked asset. That’s a strong return, even in the context of crypto, and highlights the value of combining active income (creating content) with passive opportunities like HSBI.
HSBI's Secondary Effects
On its face, then, HBSI seems like one of the best vehicles for building a stake in Hive from posting content. By delegating HP to HSBI, I’m also essentially buying promotion for any post of mine it votes on - and increasing my account reputation.
Increasing these metrics can lead to more votes, more comments, and more followers - all metrics that have their own influence on a content creator's revenue. HSBI's ability to help content creators improve those metrics is complex beyond prediction, but the idea is provably simple: more votes on your posts means more votes on your posts.
All in all, it’s a strategy that aligns well with my goal of building a meaningful stake on the platform.
HSBI Boosts Posting Revenue and Engagement
If you want to get to 1440HP, not by buying it but by earning it through posting, more votes on your posts is the way to get there.
HSBI provides that directly, potentially securing more engagement that can build on itself.
That makes HSBI an attractive place to delegate HP. I'll be testing out the service's real-world results myself, and recommend other content creators who have "extra" HP consider the product itself.
Support This Content
If you liked this post, you might like my blog! If you want to support this writing:
- Anyone can:
- Hive users:
- This was originally posted to the Hive blockchain.
- Folk earn tokens for publishing and curating content.
- Users can upvote this post to reward me, and earn rewards themselves.
- Purchase HSBI units to support curation on my posts
- Leave a tip in your comment with
!LUV,!PIZZA,!BBH, or your favorite tip token.- (This usually only works if you have some of these tokens. I wrote about that here.)
- Consider becoming my fan, and automatically upvoting my new posts.
- Long-time Hive user? Give me advice!
- Keep it simple: send HIVE or HBD (or any other token you please) to my wallet.
- Not on Hive? Consider registering a free Hive account.
- This was originally posted to the Hive blockchain.
