It is Sunday morning and I enjoy a coffee reading my Following feed when I come across a post by .
Not only does he have a wonderful story to share about how people help each other on Hive, I learned something new and very important by reading that post which I want to share with you in more depth.
Ah crap, this is gonna be one of those looooong posts where you cannot cut yourself short?
Right, but don't worry, there is a tl;dr down below.
Ok, so here we go:
Hardfork 26 happened
During HF26 last Tuesday a lot of things happened. One of them was a few members in guild chat complaining they lost all their RC. We could only speculate what was happening, since no one of us has any deeper technical insights into Hive but for some strange and to us unknown reason I was not affected.
So I delegated a few HP to help people out.
Then I remembered I had a second Hive account running my Splinterlands rentals via Rent Golem by splex.gg and took a look. Its HP went down the drain as well. 😔
After some silent cursing (I had just figured out the right amount of HP to delegate for it to run smoothly) I pumped in another 50HP to keep things going.
So far HF26 was not shining in the brightest light in my eyes. 😒
But now things have changed.
Rumors and Headaches
There was some talk here and there about the way RC will be handled from now on and I could not make any sense out of the snippets I picked up but as long as things were running for me I had no intention of investigating further.
The most used (by me) frontends were up and running, my rentals were ok and my fellow guild members were back on track to shift some cards through the rental market to keep playing.
A few tipping bots were having trouble but that would be taken care of eventually so I just had to accept that some tokens didn't trigger for a few days.
Yet I was confident it would all be back to business as usual within a week or so.
The chatter about RC and HP went on, I did not pay much attention. But things were being changed.
The Rent Golem was showing the RC in million units now instead of the HP. There was talk in discord about it, which I did not fully understand and did not have nor take the time to go into.
It was said before the fork that custom json would increase in RC price and I put it all in that drawer in my head.
Must be connected to having a better overview of the custom json costs somehow.
The Penny drops
And just this morning I finally realized to full impact of HF26 on my Hive-life. Thanks again to crrdlx: Your post finally broke the knot. While you did not bang your head against the drywall fixing your bots, mine went down on my desk as a punishment: How stupid was I not realizing what was happening.
You can now delegate RC directly instead of HP.
Before HF 26
When you stake your Hive you get Hive Power. Hive Power generates Resource Credits over time. There is a max on RC depending on your HP. Most frontends present your available RC as a percentage value compared to the maximum your HP would generate.
The picture on the right shows the voting mana (blue) and RC (green) in percentages. (Ignore the red one, I don't really use it).
Remember, when you wrote a post as a newbie on Hive? Maybe you had 5HP as a starting point? And after one post your RC were down 50%.
Nowadays, while you gathered HP over time one post only throws you back a few points. Because RC are calculated absolute but shown by the frontend as a relative value.
My head hurts
Here's the gist: HP generates RC and RC is the fee you pay for doing something (posting, voting, token transfer, etc.) on Hive. The more HP you have, the bigger your storage for RC.
So for my rental account to perform the card management actions on Hive it needs RC, and to generate that, it needs HP. Luckily, HP can be delegated, meaning I still own it but my rental account uses it.
Unfortunately my voting value also depends on the HP I have. Delegated HP also affects the voting value.
So I lost a vote value of ~0.002$ to my rental account just to keep things going with the card market. And it was sitting on the generated voting values without making any use of it.
HF26 changes things
What I learned from the post mentioned above:
You can now delegate RC as well.
Uh what now?
crrdlx mentioned a tool: https://delegate.superhive.me/ written by &
with help from
.
Having a look at that, it finally made click in my head.
Ok, make it click in my head as well, please
I'll try: Instead of delegating HP to my rental, I can keep all the HP on my account and delegate some of the generated RC over. I've set it to 60 million RC to begin with.
Whenever it performs an action on Hive (setting a price for a card, renting out a card, etc.) it taps into the RC now and is allowed to drain up to 60m RC. The HP on my account will refill it over time again.
But why is that better than delegating HP directly?
Because I keep the voting mana. I can get my full voting value back which means my vote counts more and my curation rewards increase as well.
HP not only generates RC but also voting mana. While that was basically lost on the rental account, I now have full control over the full voting mana and its value while the rental account can perform its actions separated from my account.
So call back all HP delegations and make them RC delegations?
That depends on why you delegate HP in the first place.
With HP delegation you give someone RC to perform actions and a higher vote value. With RC delegation you only give them RC to perform actions but their vote value does not increase.
It makes sense to give only RC to automated accounts that are just performing actions. Rental bots and even Splinterlands playing bots. Also other bots live Luv-bot (and hbit-bot). They do not vote but perform a lot of actions. They can use the surplus RC from your account to do what they were made to do: Spread love and mine for treasure while you keep all the voting power.
If you want to give someone a higher vote value as well, you delegate HP. That's just like it was before HF26.
So for the bigger curation accounts you would still delegate HP and not only RC. Only the HP delegation also generates voting mana on the other account.
TL;DR
Finally. Now get to the point
- You can now delegate your RC directly. This enables the other account to perform actions but does nothing to their voting power
- You can still delegate HP like before. This enables the other account to perform actions and increases their voting power.
- Check out https://delegate.superhive.me/ for delegating RC
- Other frontends are also picking up on this new option (e.g. look closely in your peakd wallet)
Final thoughts
In my point of view HF26 is finally shining in the bright light it is intended to be. This new RC delegation makes us all more flexible and also gives us a better chance to support projects by delegating RC instead of HP.
I think a lot of people have a lot of HP in their account but not delegating because they do not want to lose their voting value. Yet they perform very few actions. Now they can give the surplus RC to projects like the Luv-bot and alike to help out making this an even better place.
Thank you for reading and hopefully you will join me in taking some time to reorganize delegations 😉.
And if you are kind-hearted you take the time and delegate a few RC to 😘
Header image designed with Canva.
Divider image designed by myself with inkscape.
Other images screenshots from various frontends.