Hey folks!

I've been on Hive a little over 3 months and whilst there's still much to learn, I thought this a good time to write about some things that weren't obvious to me - whilst the confusion is still relatively fresh!

So I have 6 points in 2 parts - the first 3 are some really basic things that might help someone thinking about starting Hive or who has just started. And the second part is some slightly more advances but just as unobvious things I figured out in subsequent weeks.

NB: This isn't meant to be a comprehensive getting started guide to Hive - and it definitely simplifies/skips over some things. For more in depth see the links I've put at the end.

Part 1 - The First Week

1. Hive isn’t a single website - there are many views onto the same content.

E.g. For blogging I mostly use:
https://peakd.com/@tdctunes
but exactly the same content appears at:
https://hive.blog/@tdctunes and https://ecency.com/@tdctunes
…and others!

If you publish to one, you are publishing to the Hive Blockchain so your content will appear on all the various Hive Front Ends.

Here's my blog on a few of them:

2. Keys NOT Passwords

When you create a Hive account you will create a set of private keys which are long strings of characters.

It is absolutely critical that you store these in a safe place - personally, I store my keys in 1Password (a commercial password manager application) and I have also printed them out as a backup and keep that somewhere secure at home.

If someone gets your private keys they can take over your account and take the money you have in it! There is no Password Reset facility!

NB: There are great reasons for this but the explanation for that is beyond this post.

3. Your influence increases the more Hive you have.

Hive is free to use and (unlike many other blockchains) there are no transaction fees. However, you do benefit by having money stored as Hive Power.

A lot of things have monetary rewards on Hive, including upvotes (likes) - each has a reward attached to it which is typically split 50/50 between the person doing the upvote and the author of the content they are upvoting. The amount of reward depends on the upvoter’s Hive Power - the more they have, the more it’s worth.

There are also Resource Credits which limit how often you can perform actions on Hive (like posting, commenting and voting) - this isn’t an issue when you have a decent amount of Hive Power but might be to start with - you’ll need a little bit of Hive Power to be able to use Hive effectively.

Part 2 - First month (or so)

1. Claim rewards for second layer tokens!

If like me you are using Hive Engine curation tags or holding them and then voting on posts that use those tags, don't forget to collect the rewards! This can be done at: https://hive-engine.com/ via the drop down menu at the top right by selecting "Rewards" and then Claim All.

I find there is normally quite a bit of a delay before the rewards page reflects your transaction - so if you want to check, come back in a minute or two and refresh it rather than keep hitting Claim All thinking it hasn't worked (I'm talking to myself here - I still do that all the time!)

2. In Rising Star - you need Starbits on Hive Engine before you can buy cards.

If you're like me and picked up the music career game @risingstargame - be aware - the game maintains it's own balances of your game tokens which are separate from your Hive Engine balances and that's where your mission rewards go initially.

But if you want to buy packs either directly or via the market, you need to withdraw your balances to Hive Engine - as purchasing/trading use the balances there. To withdraw head over to the account page...

3. Delegations overwrite previous delegations (also - where on earth to see your delegations!)

You may have or want to set up an HP Delegation to other accounts. Delegating to certain curation accounts can earn you worthwhile rewards. For example I'm delegating to @hive.pizza for a decent APR return.

What wasn't obvious to me when I wanted to change the amount of one of my delegations was that a new delegation instruction simply replaces the previous one. So if I currently delegate 200HP to @hive.pizza and then create a new delegation of 500HP, my delegation will be 500HP (not 700HP!). This is particularly confusing if you are just using Hive Keychain to setup delegations as it doesn't show your current delegations.

If you want to see your current delegations, head over to https://wallet.hive.blog/ and click on Delegations:

If you are like me and your first port of call is the Hive Keychain Wallet functionality it's really worth at least familiarising yourself with the hive.blog view of your wallet for this and other things you might just not know about (the market feature allowing direct trading between Hive and HBD for example!)

Learn More

I’ve only scratched the surface in this post!

The following goes into a lot more detail and explains the concepts and terminology behind Hive really well. There’s a lot of info, but you are probably going to need to get your head round all of this at some point if you want to be active/successful on Hive:

https://jryze.me/hive/

After that the following are great sources of info:

Three Things Newbies should do in their first week on Hive

https://peakd.com/@newbies-guide

Finally

One of my motivations for writing up some of these was to have something to share with people I meet who are interested in Hive. So I'm super grateful for links to any other great posts and links anyone might know about for new people in addition to the links above.

Thanks for reading and here's to learning a bit more about Hive every day!