I've been working a lot with the technical side of the Blockchain these past two weeks. For me, the best way to learn is to do, and therefore I created some basic projects to accomplish while I learn. One of these projects is called "Blockchain Tug of War" and exists as a method to rank two topics against each other in terms of engagement on the HIVE Blockchain. I created this project as the front-end presentation of a technical method of analyzing tag-based real-time data. It took me two hours to finish the project, although I did already have a lot of the back-end ready from the prior project as the two have a lot of similarities.
To test my project I needed to compare some tags against each other. The Tug of War game streams the Blockchain data and filters tags included on posts. If the tag matches the comparison argument, it increments the "game score" by 1. At the end of the user-defined expiration date, the tag with a higher score than the other "wins" the game. To start, I chose to compare the tag dog with the tag cat. After a few minutes I realized there was a little bit less engagement with these two tags than I wanted for testing purposes, so I also added a "game" to compare the tags art and music. These tags get utilized a lot more on posts and so they would be a better fit to provide the necessary testing data I needed to ensure my project was working as expected.
I set dog and cat to end its comparison tracking on 3/1/2022, and I set art and music to end on 2/6/2022 (which has already passed). The results were pretty surprising, and provided the exact information I needed for my test.
As you can see, so far cat was used twice as much as dog as a tag included on posts!
Additionally, art was used twice as much as music! The tracking for art and music has ended, so art won the "tug of war" game this time, but dog and cat are still up in the air until March 1st, so we'll just have to see!
If you happen to want to skew the scores, until March 1st you can include the word dog or the word cat as a tag/topic on your post to increase the score!
The scores for dog and cat surprise me, I really though they would be about equal! Art and music is pretty surprising to me as well, but I understand the difference to some extent because art is likely a better fit for posts on HIVE because it is visual, whereas music cannot be expressed by blog post alone. Personally I am more inclined to post about dogs and music, but art and cats are a close second!
Although this project exists mainly just as a fun game, it sets the foundation of analytics tracking that can be used for larger or more professional purposes. One of my favorite aspects of HIVE is the fact that the Blockchain is a public ledger, which means everyone gets access to everything in terms of data and utility. Unlike traditional means of currency, this means that it is pretty impossible to do something sneaky on the Blockchain without someone noticing, and personally I believe that this type of audit trail has great potential and utility in the real world.
I'm still working on new projects and tasks every day, and additionally working on better ways to organize and share resources and information with other people who want to learn and work on their own projects. If you are interested in things like this or in the technical side of the HIVE Blockchain, please keep in touch! Thank you for reading, and let me know if you agree with the data!