Today is the monthly HPUD day. This occurs on the first of each month. It is an initiative that is vitally important to the long-term success of Hive.
What is HPUD?
It stands for Hive Power Up Day. This is a project that seeks to get as many people as possible to power up Hive.
In this article, we will detail why this is so important.
The vitalness of HPUD is not so much the results it gets. In reviewing it, there is very little in terms of total Hive powered up, as compared to the overall. However, this is not the main point in my view.
What HPUD does is it brings awareness to all members of the Hive community, especially newer as well as smaller accounts.
Powering up is an important aspect to the overall effectiveness of Hive. The results carry long-term impacts far beyond what most people understand.
Hive is a DPoS platform. This stands for Delegated Proof of Stake. It differs from many other PoS systems in that the reward pool is based upon stake, both owned and delegated. What this impacts is the distribution of the newly generated tokens.
Hive Power enters the equation in two areas. Here we see the fact that many focus upon the second layer tokens as adversarial to the overall distribution of Hive Power.
While this is logical, it is also why HPUD is so crucial to bring awareness to this situation.
Reward Pool
The rule of thumb the more HP one has, the great the value of the voting power. This is essential since the reward pool that is tied to Proof-of-Brain activities (posting and curating) is based upon the totality of the votes accumulated along with the associated voting power of each account.
Thus, if one adds more to his or her Hive Power, the value of the vote will increase (as long as the total amount of HP did not radically increase). We see how one can have a greater impact with every single upvote.
Governance
Here we have something that is extremely overlooked yet is an essential conversation piece.
All governance on chain is determined by, you guessed it, Hive Power. Again, we with PoB voting, the more one has, the greater the impact. Basically, one's influence on chain is in direct proportion to the amount of Hive Power held.
Governance comes into play with Witness and Proposal voting. The first tells us who is part of the consensus witness pool At the same time, the later encompasses how the monies from the DHF are doled out.
A great deal is made about the power of the whales and how a few accounts can greatly influence things. This is where the power of PoS systems come into play.
From this standpoint, the only thing that matters is stake. The more stake one has, the more influence one wields.
This is also true for a collective standpoint.
Therefore, HPUD is bringing awareness to this fact. If smaller accounts will power up, their value on the network grows.
Of course, the tendency is to overlook one's input if an account is small. After all, what is the difference if one goes from 50 to 100 HP. Overall, that means very little.
On its own, taken at face value, I would agree. However, we need to step back to get a better picture of what is taking place.
First, when one goes from 50 to 100 HP, the influence on the chain doubled (presuming again the total amount of HP locked didn't skyrocket). This is something smaller accounts can do. Larger accounts will encounter a great deal of difficulty going from say 500K to 1M HP. It can be done but it takes a lot of money.
This takes on even greater meaning when viewed from a collective point of view.
The second point in this is that a large amount of smaller accounts have the ability to use this same premise to grow their total influence. If 1,000 accounts do this, we will see an increase of 50K HP in those accounts.
With a price of about 60 cents, this is like $60 per account. Are there 1,000 people on Hive who can afford $60 (or even $100) to power up?
It will be interesting to see what the numbers amount to for the HPUD. This is something that is crucial to the long-term health of Hive. Of course, powering up should not be a once a month affair. Each of us should keep growing our influence as much as we can.
Ultimately, it is all a numbers game. If there were 1 million people who were approaching this chain in this manner, things would change within a couple month. At this point, we know things are nowhere near that level.
However, in the meantime, HPUD is providing an essential service for Hive. While it is helping to alter the numbers slightly, the biggest benefit is it it bringing attention to this vital concept. It is at the core of Hive so all should be aware of this.
As much as second layer tokens are attractive, exciting, and, perhaps, explosive, they provide zero towards governance on Hive.
Here, each person has a vote. However, not all votes are weighed equally. The way to increase our individual, as well as collective power, is to stake Hive on a regular basis. This will keep expanding our impact.
HPUD is helping to foster this notion. It is a great reminder how important governance really is.
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