SPT? Power? HIVE? Stake? HBD? Help!! - Newbie Guide to Blogging on Splintertalk
You started playing Splinterlands, and you heard that MONEY could be made by writing stuff on Splintertalk. What now?
It's very easy! You just have to write and publish posts on Splintertalk, then you'll receive your rewards half in SPT, half in SPT Power; but also half in Hive Power and half in HBD; then you just stake the SPT and Hive into more SPT Power and Hive Power and vote on good posts to earn even more on curation rewards! Also, put HBD on savings to earn extra interest!
If all those words didn't made any sense and are just like random gibberish, this post is exactly for you!
Two Disclaimers
First of all, blogging on Hive (including Splintertalk), is NOT a money-making scheme that will make you rich by tomorrow. You also won't earn anything if you just spam, copy stuff from elsewhere, or just create low-quality content. But, if you like creating content (writing, streaming, etc.), you can succeed if you do a good job.
(And if you have a FOOLPROOF idea on how to deceive everyone and reap the rewards, it's not foolproof; people WILL find out and you'll be instantly shunned by the whole community. Please don't try. Please.)
Secondly, I won't be talking about, in this post, about the technological stuff going behind Hive, how Blockchain works, etc. I will be talking about the "practical stuff" to new users, like me, that are just finding out about Hive because of Splinterlands: what you can earn, how you'll receive these rewards, where you can find your stuff, what you can do with them, etc.
Hive Social Network
You just bought your 10$ Summoner's Spellbook on Splinterlands. Nice!
When you requested those "Account Keys", you received the details of your Hive Blockchain account, including your Master Passwords and some Keys (Private, Active, Memo). If you didn't got those, you can request them by clicking on the "Request Account Keys" in your Splinterlands account menu.
With them, you can now access the MAGIC WORLD OF THE HIVE BLOCKCHAIN.
First Layer of Blogging
There are some websites that shows everything that exists in the Hive Blockchain. In other words: all the posts that exist in the Hive Network will show up on those blogging platforms.
We'll call them "First Layer" Websites.
The main different across these websites is the layout. Also, some of them offer a few extra tools, like saving a Draft of the post you're writing. But you're free to chose any of them to use, as any of them will work perfectly fine.
Hive.Blog is the "generic", basic Hive frontend. Ecency.com and PeakD.com are other very popular frontends.
According to this post by @dalz, PeakD is the most used frontend followed closely by Hive.Blog, while Ecency is 5-6x smaller than the firs two.
Second Layer of Blogging
People started to create communities in Hive Network. For example, Splinterlands created a community to talk about the game called Splintertalk. Gamers created Hive Gaming. Financial-savvy guys created LeoFinance. Pet Lovers created Hive Pets. Fitness-lovers created Actifit.
Some of those communities also developed blogging platforms that would JUST show the content related to their own community.
We'll call these websites "Second Layer Websites".
In Splintertalk.io, you'll just find Splinterlands content. In Actifit.io, just Fitness content. In LeoFinance.io, just financial/crypto content.
Not all of those communities have those "Second Layer" websites. Hive Gaming and Hive Pets, for example, don't have their own websites. You can only find them inside the "First Layer" platforms, like Ecency or PeakD.
When you're creating a post, you can "tag" it with a few keywords, and that's how these "Second Layer" websites filter the content.
In Splintertalk, for example, only posts with the tag "splintertalk" or "splinterlands" will show up.
In the other hand, in LeoFinance only posts with the tag "leo" will appear.
When you use these "Second Layer" websites to write, they'll auto-tag your post with the appropriate keyword.
Let's see some examples:
If you write on Splintertalk, your post will show up in 1) Splintertalk and 2) all First Layer websites (as they always show up everything), but 3) won't show up in LeoFinance as it doesn't have "leo" keyword.
If you write on LeoFinance, your post will show up in 1) LeoFinance and 2) all First Layer websites, but 3) won't show up in Splintertalk as it doesn't have the "splinterlands" keyword.
If you write on any of those sites (Splintertalk, LeoFinance, PeakD, etc.) and manually tag your post with "splinterlands" and "leo", your post will show up on 1) Splintertalk (due "splinterlands" keyword), 2) LeoFinance (due "leo" keyword), and 3) all First Layer websites (as always).
OK, now I understand the whole Blogging stuff! But... where's the Money?
Let's talk about the Rewards!
When you write a post in the Hive Network (First Layer or Second Layer websites, it doesn't matter), other people will be able to vote on your post for 7 days. Each vote is worth something in terms of Hive Rewards. After the 7 days, the post won't be able to receive new votes, and you'll receive the rewards into your Wallet.
Let's take a look at this post as an example.
As I've wrote it 6 days ago, there's still 21 hours for people to vote on it. After this period ends, the 1.989$ will be distributed. The post will receive this reward because it got 102 votes:
This is some of the voters. The largest voter is @ctime with a vote worth of 0.127$, and the second one is @monster-curator with a 0.053$ vote.
But this reward won't be all mine.
Rewards are distributed 50% to the author (me, in this case) and 50% to everyone who voted (all these 102 voters). That's why people vote on stuff: they also earn a share of the rewards when they're finding good content to vote.
The jargon commonly used to refer to this is Curation Rewards. The voters ("Curators") find good content across the Hive, vote on them, and are rewarded with 50% of the vote value.
So I'll receive 0.9945$, while all the voters will share the other 0.9945$.
How the Rewards are Paid
When you create a post, you can setup different options to receive your rewards. I'll stick with the default option as it's what almost everyone ends up using anyway. And no, you can't chose to receive all the rewards in money or in "liquid" tokens; that's not an option.
When I receive the rewards from the post, I will NOT receive 0.9945$ in my wallet. The default option is "50% HBD and 50% HP" (each website uses different words but they all mean the same thing: "Default 50% / 50%", "50% Liquid and 50% Staked", etc.).
So my reward (0.9945$) will be paid in two different currencies: half of it (0.49725$) in HBD, and the other half (0.49725$) in HP.
Hive has 3 Currencies: HIVE, HP and HBD
Hive Wallets have 3 different currencies. If you want, you can see my Wallet here.
Hive Tokens (HIVE)
They're the actual Hive tokens from the Blockchain. They're commonly called Liquid Tokens because you can sell them instantly. They can be transferred to Crypto Exchangers like Binance or BitTrex and sold for "real-life" (fiat) money, like US Dollars or Euros.
You can exchange HIVE into other stuff on the Hive Network itself: for example, you can exchange the HIVE to DEC (Splinterland's in-game currency) through Hive-Engine and use the DEC to buy your Splinterlands cards!
And, finally, you can also convert the HIVE into Hive Power (called "power up" or "staking").
Hive Power (HP) or Staked Hive Tokens
They're Hive Tokens that are staked. Staked means that they're "locked" temporarily, and you can't instantly withdraw them.
If you have Hive Power and want to convert them into Liquid HIVE Tokens, you can request this exchange (called "power down" or "unstaking") and you'll receive the Hive Token over the next 13 weeks. Yes, it takes a lot of time.
In the other hand, the good stuff about having Hive Power is that you can vote on other posts and receive yourself the rewards. The larger your Hive Power, the larger is your vote value, and the larger are the Curation Rewards you'll receive from your own votes.
Hive Backed Dollars (HBD)
HBD is the stablecoin of the Hive Network. "Stablecoin" is the name given to tokens whose price is designed to be equal of a real-life currency. In the case of HBD, its value was designed to be 1 US Dollar.
The HBD coin works like that because the whole Hive Network guarantees that you can convert 1 HBD into enough HIVE that are worth 1 USD.
Let's give an example, as it'll be easier to understand this way.
If HIVE is currently being traded for 0.6 USD, 1 HBD will be converted into 1.667 HIVE, as 1.667 HIVE = 1 USD.
If the market value of HIVE drops to 0.5$, you'll be able to convert 1 HBD into 2 HIVE, as 2 HIVE = 1 USD.
If the market value of HIVE increases to 4$, you'll be able to convert 1 HBD into 0.25 HIVE, as 0.25 HIVE = 5$
The HIVE market price can go up and go down, it doesn't matter: you'll always be able to convert 1 HBD into 1$ worth of HIVE.
The conversions of HBD isn't perfect; that's why the actual value of 1 HBD is around 1 USD but not exactly 1 USD. But, for simplicity sake, 1 HBD is 1 dollar.
You can also move the HBD to "Hive Savings". It's still HBD, but you have to wait 3 days to withdraw it. Hive pays you 10% per year (APR) for you to keep the HBD saved. As HBD is literally money, it's a nice deal.
Token Rewards: SPT, LEO, AFIT, NEOXAG...
Remember those "Second Layer" websites, like Splintertalk or LeoFinance?
Inside these sub-communities of Hive, they also offer rewards in their own tokens.
In Splintertalk, there are rewards in SPT, currently worth 0.0083$. In LeoFinance, rewards are paid in LEO, now worth 0.18$. In Actifit, the AFIT token has a market value of 0.00047$. In The City of Neoxian, the NEOXAG is worth 0.00063$ each.
Why these tokens are worth something? Each community has its own systems in place that makes them have some value. The SPT token are in high demand nowadays because they're worth SPS Airdrop Points. The NEOXAG token, in the other hand, can be spent to buy votes from @neoxiancityvb. AFIT tokens can be used to buy fitness products on Actifit market.
These tokens are distributed using the exact same mechanism described above: people vote on your post, and after 7 days 50% of the rewards are paid to the author and 50% shared between all the voters. And those rewards are also paid 50% in "Liquid" Tokens (SPT, for example) and 50% in "Staked" Tokens (SPT Power).
To see these Token Rewards, you'll have to access the appropriate community website. You won't be able to see those on Hive.Blog, PeakD or Ecency.
I've opened the same post I was talking before, but now in Splintertalk.io. As you can see, my post will receive a reward of 10,248.623192 SPT, mainly because of the votes from @monster-curator, @dalz2, @nateaguila-spt and @brofund-spt.
My 50% author share will be 5.124,31159 SPT. In today's market, it's worth 42.53$. My SPT reward will be worth more than 40x than my HIVE reward of 0.9945$ ! Yey!
Where all these Tokens?
Each of those websites have their own Wallet, showing to you the appropriate tokens to that community.
But, if you want to see everything that is in your Hive Wallet, I strongly recommend the Hive-Engine Wallet. They will show all the tokens you have, including in-game tokens like DEC (Splinterlands), Starbits (Rising Star Game) and SIM (dCity).
Conclusion
The Hive Network is kinda complicated when you're just starting out. There's dozens of acronyms and words that are used by the community that doesn't make things easy for people that are just trying to understand what's going on.
But, after undertanding how things works, it's very rewarding to be part of this community, in which you can find intelligent people and discover interesting content to read. And, if you're a content creator yourself, you'll also be able to be rewarded accordingly for your work.
I hope that this post is useful and helps you on your Hive life! Until next time!
New Player Bonus Offer
If you're a new Splinterlands player that still haven't bought the 10$ Summoner's Spellbook, you can help both you and me by creating a new account using my Referral Link (https://splinterlands.com?ref=luizeba). If you create an account using my link and then buy the Summoner's Spellbook, leave a comment here and let me know.
I'll send you some cards for free to use on your first weeks in the game to help you progress faster through the Bronze League! Using my Referral link doesn't cost you anything extra and will make both of us stronger 💪!
If you're looking for other NFT games to play, I'm also on Rising Star and dCrops.
Unless stated otherwise, all images are Unless stated otherwise, all images are 1) created and owned by me; 2) from the game featured in the post; or 3) royalty-free and usable for both personal/commercial usage from Pexels, Pixabay or Unsplash.
Hive Illustration: HiveBlocks
Stablecoin Illustration: Coinbase
Also, this is definitely not a financial advice. Cryptocurrencies are very volatile, so don't invest what you can't afford to lose.*