This is a highly comprehensive guide and look at Hive, PeakD, LeoFinance, 3Speak, Hiveblocks, Blocktrades, Hive Engine, and DLease. I will be covering all the features of Hive, the sign-up process, and everything you need to get started.
If you can’t find an answer in this blog, please watch the video for the full breakdown. Below are the timestamps to help you find various sections:
00:00 Intro
00:22 Signing Up
05:00 Your Private Keys
08:03 Powering Up Hive
11:53 Setting Up Your Profile
13:50 PeakD & Features Of Hive
16:17 LeoFinance
18:45 DLease Delegations
20:56 Hive Community Creation
21:38 Hive Delegations
24:30 Hive Engine & Hive Communities
29:00 Trading On Hive Engine
33:20 Hive Wallet
40:00 Hive Market
42:00 Hive Savings
44:43 Content Creation
48:32 Hive Content Feed
50:08 Communities
52:43 3Speak
55:54 Tags
57:14 Transfer Hive
59:04 Selling/Withdrawing Hive
1:00:00 Blocktrades Swap Exchange
1:03:55 HiveBlocks
1:06:23 Witnesses
1:08:23 Outro
Hive
You can find all of their information on https://hive.io/.
Signing Up
We start off by going through the sign-up process on https://signup.hive.io/. There are several options with different levels of verification. For the processes that have a value attached, it is what you are investing into your own account and not actually a fee that you have to pay. It was very quick and easy for me to verify via email through Ecency.
Login And Private Keys
You will get a master password that gives you access to your other 4 keys which have various permissions. The idea is that you can log in to different interfaces and only give them access to what they need. Since this is truly decentralized, it’s a bit more complex because you control everything. Remember, there is no support or password recovery, etc. When you log into hive.blog you will be given access to your other 4 keys which it prompts you to use instead of your master password. You can also set up your login on https://hivesigner.com/ which allows you to set a simple password for your account rather than using different keys.
Interfaces
There are many different interfaces for the platform Hive. The main one is https://hive.blog/. I usually use https://peakd.com/ as it’s a bit cleaner looking with a few more features. We will cover some other interfaces, but regardless of what you use, it’s still the same underlying platform, the same account, and the same login.
Communities
They are communities on Hive which are second layer solutions built on top of Hive that allow you to share content within a specific niche and or earn extra custom Hive tokens on top of the Hive you are earning. I typically post to LeoFinance and earn LEO tokens. You can also create your own community as well!
Hive Power & Delegations
By powering up your Hive, you increase your voting power, you earn 3.45% APR interest on your Hive, you can delegate your Hive, and it also makes up your resource credits which determine how many actions you can perform on the network.
Delegations are useful for entities that are willing to pay you to lease your Hive power and help you earn more. You can click delegate under your Hive power to do that and on PeakD for example, you can click the magnifying glass to bring up your delegations and update or cancel them. Let’s look at DLease for this.
Witnesses
You can vote for witnesses here: https://peakd.com/me/witnesses. Essentially, they help run the governance of the Hive blockchain and dedicate resources to running witness nodes that help keep the network running. You can vote for them by clicking the checkmark or you can proxy to someone who may have more insight on who is good for Hive like I do with @theycallmedan who is the creator of 3Speak.
DLease
On https://dlease.io/, I can see lease requests that people want and are willing to pay for. Then I can delegate to them for an agreed amount of time and receive a daily payout of Hive for doing so. I am currently leasing out about 3,500 Hive power and am earning 1.367 Hive per day in payouts. I am still earning my 3.45% APR, but that is being earned on the delegated Hive so I won’t see that in my account until I complete the lease or undelegate.
3Speak
So https://3speak.online/ is another interface on Hive, however, it’s video only. This serves as a decentralized video hosting alternative to YouTube. The upload process is very similar, and you will still be able to see the video on any other interface too. This is one of if not the only good video hosting solutions on Hive.
Hive Engine
You can transfer Hive into Hive Engine and or earn Hive Engine tokens from various communities on Hive. While on https://hive-engine.com/ you can see your token balance, trade them, transfer them, and withdraw or deposit Hive between Hive Engine and your Hive wallet. This way you can speculate, or take profits from various communities and sell them, powerup, or whatever you decide to do.
Blocktrades
In order to withdraw and sell your Hive, there are many ways you can do this. You can send Hive to an exchange account and sell it on there or like me, you can use a swap exchange like https://blocktrades.us/en/trade where you can swap Hive for many different cryptocurrencies with ease. I traded Hive for ETH just by pasting my address, then you can either send Hive to Blocktrades manually or use Hivesigner as I do in the video. It only took about 2 minutes for the transaction to go through.
HiveBlocks
By navigating to https://hiveblocks.com/, you can see all the activity on Hive as well as specific account activity, like your own. This allows you to see everything going on as well as see your voting power, resource credits, and much more detailed information than anywhere else.
Do you use Hive? Did you learn anything new today? Did I miss anything important? Let me know what you think about this in the comments below and leave any questions or feedback you have as well. Also, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe!
One thing that I'm still confused by (and sorry if this is addressed later...) when it comes to creating an account, why do we have so many different options? I guess part of my problem is that I don't fully understand what hive is...
When we create wallets for other crypto stuff, we create a wallet and it exists outside of a particular platform or site (or we use an exchange that holds our wallet).
When we sign up for Hive, we pick a platform (like 3speak) and it makes the account for us... but we end up holding the keys and stuff for our wallet... Why do we need to rely on these third parties to make our stuff? As I understand, an account created on 3speak will work on other hive sites, right?
Sorry if this is a really dumb question, or even something that doesn't make sense. I think once I've wrapped my head around what Hive is doing the rest will probably just kinda fall into place.