More friends are onboarding - we offer some help.
Since more and more friends get interested in what we all do here on the Hive I collected all the advice I gave on WhatsApp and other platforms and compiled it together with @Lichtkunstfoto in german and here me in English for you to share. We wanted to help everyone to have the best possible start.
This post is looong overdue but guys remember I have a normal job. So I do this in the evenings that have limited hours.
Are you ready for a longer read? Maybe you want to sit down with a few beer or lots of tea. Your choice.
We don't get any commission or anything like that if you sign up for Hive. We want to build a community and allow everyone a good start. We want to share our knowledge here. The rewards are tokens of appreciation and I guess they do motivate me as part of a recognition of the time and efforts that I put into this.
Why are you here? Most likely you know someone who told you some good things about this Hive ecosystem that hosts social media apps or Game apps decentralized finance thingy. But then you looked into it and it’s soooo complicated. You also heard that you get rewarded in cryptocurrency. Let us say you want to start and you would like to know what to do, where to start. Here is what a group of friends compiled from another post to share with our closest friends in a digestible way. Then the discussion started to share it with more people. This is what we do here.
We are no financial advisors. Our statements on the subject of cryptocurrencies are for entertainment purposes only and do not constitute financial advice. Any liability for capital losses is hereby excluded.
There is that thing called Blockchain. This one is called Hive and is technically a Hard fork (copy) of another Blockchain called Steem. After the fork, major changes were made to the way the chain is governed. The result was in essence that the participants/users got more influence on which way this ecosystem will develop into the future. The most important learning from Steem was that a hostile take or power-grab by big money must be prevented at all costs. This has now been implemented in the DNA of the Hive Blockchain. Remarkable is here that this was initiated by a lot of people and took place in early 2020. Any changes of the Blockchain need the consent of a large user group voted representatives, called witnesses.
Source Hive Creators: https://whyhive.co/
https://twitter.com/hive_creators/status/1484618813991788545/photo/1
- hive_creators
This Hive Blockchain started with the DNA of this old chain and has now evolved with many developers working to an entire Ecosystem of applications (dApps). The beauty here is that it allows the user to use a lot of decentralized applications at the same time. The user can use the same login for all applications running on the chain.
Find more information about the current state at: https://whyhive.co/
Music, Photography, Finance, or Fitness, all dApps have their applications designed around the interest of the user, sitting on the Hive Blockchain. You can choose anytime where you want to find publish your content, according to where it fits best, yet it will be accessible on all applications if wanted.
Imagine you would truly own all of the posts you posted on Facebook! Imagine Facebook would disappear, in today’s architecture of Web2. The data is hosted centralized. Not Imagine your data is your data and you post it into the web3.0 it is yours for you to stay yours. You would post it in one app, but all apps can access it. If the App you post it on does no longer exist, you can still view your content in another app. It's like your Facebook content is
also visible on LinkedIn if you like. Losing Facebook would not even matter.
When people talk about Web3.0 here you are looking at the first true version of it.
The Hive Ecosystem (End of 2021)
Source HiveCreators
“The original idea is from 
Download from original source
What else?
Why would you start here as a content creator? There is more than a sophisticated Blockchain. The incentive to use it comes from a wide range of reasoning. Creators can share their content and get “literally Tokens of appreciation” as on the other side investors are looking to invest into a social media ecosystem with underlying investment into the associated CryptoCurrency.
There is an entire website for marketing reasons with excellent infographics.
Why Hive?
How to get started on the Chain? Web3.0
You need an account on Hive. But what is that?
here is an interesting discussion be 
This is a post with a video blog you can watch
There are multiple ways and apps on which you can get onboarded and create an account.
See your choices here on Signup.hive.io
To get started you’ll need a Hive Blockchain associated account. We suggest you start your journey on Ecency because it’s a very simple and fast way to get started. There are no fees involved to do that. Also, Ecency supports First Hivers with some usable Hive Power and some other goodies that help for a smooth start. But more on that later.
Let’s say you want to share photos similar to Instagram or Facebook. Here we take the example of a photo community. There are multiple ways to post your content on the Hive blockchain.
For your Registration go to: ecency.com
Other Websites and dApps: The content will always be the same, only the presentation of your content is different. Each app may have a different understanding of a good user interface and style. Your Login details will be the same across the entire Hive Ecosystem.
Look at the organigram above: ecency.com and hive.blog and peakd.com are all apps that do similar things but are designed and published by different entities. Like a Facebook, Vine, Myspace, or a Friendster but imagine the content you created stays yours and is not lost when the company is gone that hosted it.
The Hive blockchain also has some mobile apps. Ecency also has a mobile app for your
your Smartphone: Ecency App
Don’t get discouraged this used to be an app for the Steem Blockchain. That’s why you find “esteem.mobile” in the name. It used to call eSteem.
Before you start creating an account you should understand what you getting into with Cryptocurrencies that are also involved in this Blockchain. Depending on where you live you will be subject to local tax laws. Please keep that in mind when considering how to name your profile and how much of your privacy you want to disclose in your blog posts. Also, keep in mind regulations may change.
I (
Discouragement
Everyone, yes everyone, even your tax office, can technically call up your Hive wallet and see how much money is in it, when you sent money where, when and where you got money from, etc. You don't need an account with Hive for this. Registering under a pseudonym offers a certain degree of protection. But at the latest when posting articles that have already been published elsewhere, this protection is of little use. In addition, it is certainly a good idea to use your "good name" that you have built up in other networks there as well.
If you don't want that, you can stop reading here.**
The passwords generated during registration cannot be recovered if lost. No password = no access to the account = no access to the wallet. It is urgently necessary to keep the passwords safe in several places, preferably in digital as well as analog form.
Everything you post ends up as an integral part of the blockchain after 7 days. After this period it is not possible to delete entire posts or comments. Edits are still possible, yet only result in an update of the blockchain. So please, think carefully about what you post there and whether it is a good idea to say something derogatory about others.
What you should avoid
- Posting Third-Party Content. There are several highly effective bots in the blockchain that track down and “block” any form of plagiarism
- Post content that is already part of the blockchain. Something like that is also found and blocked. So sharing the memory of 5 years ago like on Facebook is anything but a good idea.
If you refer to or quote old content it is a different thing. - Spam and phishing
- Most people who have been around a long time or bigger investors, have a lot of Voting Power to use. Their vote stands for the investment of good new content. Some may not like it when one upvotes her or his own content especially when you post 5 times a day. If you can't resist, you should do it after 5 days at the earliest. It's best to avoid it altogether. Especially since you will hardly have any Hive Power at the beginning and that will only bring in a few cents.
- Hive.blog is a social network. This only works if you behave socially. Attributes and denigrations about mockery and other people, as is usual with Facebook, are not a good idea if you want to find a few coins in your wallet anytime soon.
Introduction - Where does the money come from?
Hive is a decentralized blockchain. There is no owner, no boss. All posts posted there to become part of the blockchain after 7 days. This generates the cryptocurrencies Hive and Hive Dollar (HBD) to put it a little more simply. The third value in the wallet is the Hive Power. This is a staked hive. More on that below.
The whole system works like a cycle. I publish a blog post. A user likes it, he clicks on "Upvote". This upvote has a specific value in the Hive cryptocurrency depending on the Curator’s Hive Power. The voting power and the percentage of the user who votes. An example: the user has a hive power of 100,000, with a voting power of 83%, and makes an upvote with 100%, which corresponds to about 3 hives. (numbers change so this is just for example) With less hive power and voting power, this is correspondingly less. In addition, you get paid Hive when you upvote others, write comments on posts, and also for some other activities. However, that would be going too far here.
For starters, we recommend first building up some community and exchanging ideas, and in the meantime building up some Hive Power. I think with some 1000 to 2000 HP you start to have an impact that makes fun. Theoretically, you can also make real money and buy Hive and convert it into Hive Power back and forth (swing trading). You got to know what you are doing here.
So to summarize again: People who leave a lot of Hive in the blockchain are rewarded with a higher power. Anyone who immediately pulls everything out has no power and will most likely at some point hardly get any upvotes from others. Give and take, that's how the system works best apparently. And that's always useful for both of you. For every donation, I always get a small part back. The incentive is clearly in creating valuable quality content and voting for the “network-effect”.
Your First Post
It is more important than you might think. The Hive community is very focused on giving everyone a warm welcome. Many users look at who is coming to the Block and consider a follow and potentially start interacting and also upvoting when found some interesting new creator.
In the first post, you should write something about yourself and what you do and hope you share how you do it. Considering you are not afraid about privacy (I may guess you have a Facebook or Instagram then it’s too late anyhow) picture of you is also good.
It is important to use #introduceyourself as the first tag.
The post then ends up here: /trending/introduceyourself. Your post should contain multiple images and between 300 to 600 words. I think it's a good idea to write this and all other posts in two languages. As a great example, you can find Sven Gerard’s first post here: @lichtkunstfoto/first-post-of-alight
Posts in general
The recommendation would be to create and post your content on the Ecency website. This works mostly for images and linked video content. You get Ecency Points as a reward for using the app, more on that later.
Each post should tell a story and contain the appropriate images to illustrate the journey. The more captivating the story the more people like it. Here on Hive that translates straight into the Token of Appreciation.
Just have a look at some posts from the Light Painting colleagues, and also from other people on Hive and its communities. If you write the article in two languages, you will reach more people, and in the end, there will be a monetary incentive on both sides. You should try to keep a reasonably consistent style in the posts. Introductory text, title picture, description of the picture, next picture, etc. It doesn't have to look like me or other people there. Having your distinctive style is certainly not harmful. It is only important that the contributions are clear, easy to read, easy to understand.
You should better not post more than twice a day, better only one. If you want to post two, the interval between posts should be several hours. Nobody on Hive likes spammers. This is consistently ignored and you only get a few cents for the contribution.
From our experience Hive is not yet like Facebook with billions of users. Also, everyone is human and only active a few hours per day. The posts seem to run best between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. We experience the best exposure during the European time zones and in the evening between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. I haven't noticed any differences between the days of the week. It is not advisable to post at 7 am or at 2 am.
There is a scheduler in Ecency's editor. So you can automatically post the post at the specified time, no matter when you write it. To do this, click on "advanced" on the bottom left and then on "Schedule" in the right window.
The posts will then run for 7 days. The amount will then be transferred to your wallet. Below the contribution is a sum, in the standard-setting in US$, about half of this amount is paid out to the author and the other half to the upvoters also called curators. After the 7th day, the amount does not increase anymore. It is therefore pointless to vote for posts that are older than 7 days. The default payment setting is 50% HBD / 50% HP but can be changed to 100% HP.
The display value of the post is a sum of all votes represented in the weekly moving average value of the Hive >< Dollar (or €) exchange rate. This means a Post from early Juli 2020 that shows the Value of 20$ would be a 100$ post with the exchange rate of January 2022. The values displayed stay because that’s when it was paid out to you as creator or curator.
A brief introduction to formatting posts can be found here:
@jason04/how-to-format-your-blog-in-an-epic-way-or-aguide-for-beginners
And here's another article on the subject: @jarvie/all-about-posting
Sharing Rewards of a post.
When you create a post, you will receive 50% of your rewards. This is your creator’s reward. This can also be shared and divided into a number of beneficiaries. This is convenient because you are not sharing the same content on different accounts and hope that everyone gets an equal amount of attention and upvotes. While onboarding Sven we wrote all the tips and tricks and every advice for this document down. First, there was a German document. Then I (
If everything goes to plan, this is how it will go for this post.
While doing that we extended the document with a lot more information worth sharing. When sharing all of this in a Hive post, sharing the rewards is only consequential.
Schedule your post.
If you are not intending to be posting every day. You can also prepare multiple posts and schedule the release date as you want. This is convenient when you plan on a series not releasing all of the content at once. To do this, click on "advanced" on the bottom left and then on "Schedule" in the right window.
These functionalities are part of most apps on Hive. PeakD also offers these options.
Remember that if you don't use your HP every day you might as well delegate your HP to an active account or friend that you know curates content that you also would like to be promoted.
Set the main Image or Thumbnail
Go to the advanced settings, in the center of the frame, and the following screen allows you to select your main cover image. Really not complicated.
This can be useful when you use dividers as images and you start of with one. Some apps may get confused and show your divider as the main thumbnail to your post. Not cool.
Curating and Voting
When a post is published, everyone can react to it. You can reblog the post; you can vote on a post, and you can also comment on a blog post. You can also vote on comments if the comment has a great value in it or you just want to set incentives for commenting on your posts. Every action can result in a reward of some sort. In Hive, Hive Power, Hive dollar, or in any of the Tokens coming from an individual project that would like to support any of the curations.
For seven days you can vote on a post or comment with the reward shared between the curator and curator at 50% each. If the vote is placed after seven days, it will not result in a payout. Also, the minimum payout reward is 2cent.
A vote can be positive or negative. Yes, you can “Downvote” content. This is only interesting if the impact is substantial. If you downvote with a cent it’s a clear signal but has most likely no impact on the person's behavior. One would consider that for spam, abusive comments, and mobbing in general.
The slider with the blue dot (depending on what App you will use) allows you to select how much you want to dedicate to this post.
When you vote you use your Hive Power Mana? As a rule of thumb, you can upvote 10x at 100% per day and lose 10% of your mana. If you would like to curate 20 posts per day just select 50% to lose 10% voting power. How much of your power you have, you’ll see close to your profile picture. The purpose here is to really think every day who and what content is of great quality that should be curated and supported. Just think about the content that you saw, and which is worth supporting.
Tags
The first day is important, it determines in which group your contribution will be posted. In Ecency's editor, you can select the one at the top left above the formatting tools. Your own blog and all the groups you are a member of will be displayed there when you expand that. I have had good experiences with “PhotoFeed”. “Photography Lovers” might work just as well though. Many colleagues seek tags like #qurator, #ocd, #ocdb, #curangel, etc. These tags are curators with big curation trails or wallets. However, trying to use these tags to motivate these curators to upvote is pointless, or even harmful. Some of the curators see this as a necessity. Apart from that, the curators can also find your posts without these tags because they are specifically looking for good content in the relevant groups such as “Photography Lovers” or “PhotoFeed”. You should only use tags that are related to the topic of your post (#lightpainting, #photography, etc.).
In total, you can either use a maximum of 10 tags (Ecency, PeakD) or a maximum of 8 (Hive.blog). Another reason to post in Ecency.
#posh is a form of verification that the content is "real" and from a real person shared on other social media such as Twitter. Proof Of Share
You have to tag your post with it and then, preferably immediately, share this post in your Twitter account. The Twitter account must have the same name as your Hive account. If necessary, simply create a new Twitter account. When tweeting, you should use the #hive #HiveBlogshare and #posh tags. Of course, you can also use the "normal" tags. After a while, you will then get the confirmation as a comment from the "poshtoken" account under your post on Hive. Use the link there to connect your Twitter account to your Hive profile. You only have to do this the first time; it will be saved there.
Wallet
Here's a look into a wallet viewed on Hive.blog:
What means all that?
Sometimes I still feel like a newbie and some of that is also to me not entirely clear so: Disclaimer; if someone has a better explanation please put it in the comments.
HIVE: This is the actual cryptocurrency that runs the incentive structure of the Blockchain. This is liquid and can be moved to HIVE POWER (power-up), HIVE DOLLAR, SAVINGS, or another crypto wallet without delay. The course of the HIVE often fluctuates quite a bit. The low was $0.08 in March 2020 and the high was $3.41 in November 2021.
HIVE POWER
The value is 1:1 in HIVE. This value describes the value with which you perform actions such as upvoting and others.
When accumulating Hive one can use them to “Power Up” the Hive Power. The Hive Power is like the mana for every voting activity.
A delay of 13 weeks is built-in for Power Down to stabilize the Hive course. Example: I have 1300 Hive Power and initiate a Power Down. Then 100 Hive Power per week will be converted into Hive for 13 weeks. This process can be stopped at any time. So if I want 100 Hive I'll power down and stop after the first week.
Hive Power can be delegated, i.e. temporarily transferred to another user. This then votes additionally with the delegated HIVE POWER. In return, there is a small fee.
**HIVE DOLLAR (HBD): **This Hive native Stable coin is designed to stay in 1:1 relation to the US dollar. The price usually still moves in the range of $0.95 to $1.05, so it has some stability. HIVE DOLLARs can also be saved in SAVINGS. When converting to Hive, a delay of 3 days is programmed to prevent price manipulation.
SAVE: As the name clears it, you have HIVE and HIVE DOLLARs saved there. All transactions are executed with a delay of 3.5 days. This serves as additional security in the event of unauthorized access, because the transaction can still be stopped in this case. For HBD there is currently 12% interest in SPAR. These are then paid weekly.
Secondary this prevents, as a result, fast withdrawals that everyone pulls out the funds super fast risking the Hive Dollar or Hive to a quick crash. It stabilizes the exchange rate. We all like certain predictability in a currency.
Ecency Points
One of the best parts and biggest drivers to use Ecency as a platform is the native Ecency point (Token) that translates into In-App incentives. These can be boosting or gifting to a blog post of your choice.
How do you get these tokens?
You earn points for almost every activity you carry out on the Ecency website or app. This process is automatically done in the background, you have nothing to activate or do.
You can then use these points to boost your or someone else's post. This means that the post you chose gets an upvote from the Ecency curation trail. This upvote is usually worth twice the value of the points wagered.
In addition, you can also give the points to another user, who then uses them to boost worthy contributions. I don't think boosting your own posts is a particularly good idea. Many users are bothered by this and then do not upvote the post. It's up to you to decide. I am personally indifferent.
Each post can only be upvoted once. This means if the content was already boosted you cant do this as an add-on. If you try the Ecency curation trail rejects your request and the points will automatically return to your Ecency wallet.
If see fit and it necessary, you can also buy points with HIVE or HBD.
Hive Engine Tokens
There are multiple tokens are also generated on the actual blockchain. These are then distributed for specific campaigns or posts. All of a sudden, pizza, beer, wine, cents, and whatever their names are end up in your wallet. You can stake the tokens or convert them to Hive or HBD. To do this, go to https://hive-engine.com/ and log in there.
Delegation
On Hive you can delegate your Hive Power to other accounts/projects. This can be interesting for multiple reasons.
- If you are not active all the time and you want your HP to be used regularly you can delegate some parts of your HP to someone else that you would like to support. This can be an account that is curating other content regularly. This means your HP will be used regularly without you being active at all.
- Some projects deserve for that reason to grow because they put incentives on great content and support individuals that are posting great content. This way you become a Patreon of an entire niche community. If you feel a specific project deserves some help delegate some HP. Even a small amount will add up to help.
You can do this very easy in ecency:
Step1
Step2
How to delegate to
Delegate 50HivePower
The rewards out of this action will be shared by the person that curates, you and the creator of course. An automated win-win-win situation within a circle.
Curation trail
Similar to delegation you can help other creators passively. If you know someone that you know shows similar interest as well as curates great content you can have an automated upvoting for either all that they think deserves an upvote or again you can find a niche community and follow their curation trail. This way you follow what they are curating and upvote other creators’ content that should align with your interests. Here is your HP directly active and all rewards are coming to the creator and your profile. An automated win-win situation within a small circle.
Thank you
**How to do that? **
Go to https://hive.vote/ and log in with your normal Keys or Hive Signer. You’ll see it’s not magic.
Under the menu point delegation and Fanbase, you can automate your vote to accounts you like.
There are a few useful settings you can adjust to your liking.
How does the Hive become real Dollars or Euros?
I can't pay for gas at the gas station or beer with Hive. So these are just random numbers. It's also not that easy because you can't exchange Hive directly for euros, dollars, or Vietnamese Dong. In any case, I don't know of any crypto exchange where that would work. Also the other way around, i.e. if I want to buy Hive, there is no such way. But Hive has been growing and reached a critical mass that trading volumes become more interesting and you can almost exchange instantly your Hive into Bitcoin, Ethereum, Doge, or Monero and move to your private wallets as you please.
Pick it up and wait or rather spend it straight away?
That's almost poetic.
If you want to keep the Hive for the time being because you are sure that the price will rise, you can simply leave the Hive in the Hive wallet or convert it to Hive Power. But since everyone can see your wallet, this is certainly not the best idea beyond a certain holding. There are always envious people who don't begrudge you your success. Personally, I suggest don’t park more than a few thousand euros in the Hive Wallet.
There are several crypto exchanges. Some seem like an illegal barter in the dark backyard. In the meantime, however, there are also reputable exchanges such as Binance. Binance operates based on the laws of the country in which the user resides. This has many advantages, but Binance may report profits to the German tax office and capital gains tax may then be due. Larger sums should therefore not necessarily be moved and parked at Binance, but rather kept in your wallet (see above).
Signing up for Binance is pretty easy if only identification worked a little better. You have to take a photo of your ID card and then a selfie. After identification, you can then act without restrictions. Deposit euros, trade cryptos, and apply for a Visa credit card. This card is free. If you make transactions using BNB (their own Binance Coin), there is even up to 8% cashback. The credit card is the easiest way I know to spend the Hive. With the card, you can withdraw a maximum of €290 per day from the machine or make sales of up to €8,700 per day, i.e. buy something in a shop or online.
You can find a good video to get you started here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=YzJ6xkJpeUk&t=1384s&ab_channel=CoinBureau
Transfer Hive to Binance and exchange to other currency
After you have logged into your Binance account, go to Wallet – Fiat & Spot and then to Deposit Crypto. You select Hive and then the address and memo for your account are displayed. The address is always deepcrypto8. Be sure to include the memo, otherwise, the hive will be gone in Nirvana. And not the memo from the picture, because that is Svens!
The Hive would then land with me. After that, go to your Hive wallet and click on "Transfer". There you enter how many of your hives you want to transfer, where they should go (deepcrypto8), and, VERY IMPORTANT, your memo. In the last step, you confirm the transaction with your private active or owner key from Hive and then the cryptos start their journey. After a few minutes, the hive should appear in your Fiat & Spot wallet. For the first transaction, it might make sense to do a test run with 0.1 Hive to see if that works.
Purchase some Hive
If you want to buy Hive investor because you are speculating on a price gain or want to celebrate your Hive Power, the path is similar. In the past I always used Blocktrades and this has been my go-to exchange.
On Binance this works as well when you go to "Buy Crypto" then choose either P2P Trading if you want to transfer or pay with your credit card, i.e. not with the Binance credit card but with the one from your bank. Then you choose which fiat currency you want to pay with, probably EUR. Then you choose what you want to buy. In the case of BUSD. With "Continue" the BUSD will then go into your wallet. You can then swap these into HIVE and the HIVE into yours.
Transfer wallet to Hive. In contrast to most other cryptos, this is very easy with Hive. You simply transfer them to your Hive username, in this case, 
We hope we haven't forgotten anything important, and I wish you a good start at Hive.
If you still need help, we recommend searching the Hive Blog for terms like Beginners Guide, there are some useful posts there. Otherwise, we are a community and happy to answer any questions you may have, but please consider that we ourselves often feel like newbies sometimes just like you. The network is evolving and, we don’t know it all when it comes to all the possibilities of this network either. If you want to share some learnings get back to us, we extend this document.
We thank you for considering joining the Hive community. We want to help you to make it worthwhile with all your effort. Let us do this.
Mega thanx also to the awesome developers of Ecency! You can clearly see there is a bunch of people loving your work and the Application! Thanx 
Who are we?
This post was written by Gunnar Heilmann (engl version) and Sven Gerard (Deutsch).
I hope you found it helpful and inspirational. If you have more questions please do not hesitate. I am happy to share my knowledge. I have a feeling this is way too long. Anyhow hopefully one or two read that far.
Gunnar Heilmann Photography
If you are interested in more of my art please also see:
My NFT'S on Rarible
Website YouTube Facebook Page Instagram Feed
Since I am one of the cofounders of the LightPainters project, I also help and support the Light Painting community as a curator - not only on the Hive.
We are Light Painters
To help and support the LightPainters community here on Hive I would appreciate your delegation of HivePower. Any amount is appreciated. It does not require much to get started, we are happy for any gesture.
How to delegate?
Delegate 50HivePower, [50HP]
Delegate 250HivePower, [250HP]
Delegate 500HivePower, [500HP]
Delegate 1000HivePower, [1000HP]
All the Hive Power will help to upvote the artist's contribution as part of the LightPainters community.
If you feel like light painting could be interesting for you, feel free to check out this crazy bunch at LightPainters on Hive: 
I am super happy that more and more find their way here into the hive.
Thank you so much!