Hi everyone, I hope you all are doing well. This is the third post in my hive guide and will focus on some additional terms, hive keys, and the governance of hive. This post is really important to understand how things take place on hive and how you take part among them or how you are responsible for them. This will be a short one as I think I have discussed most of the terms and features in the previous post. So let's hop in.
Who Governs Hive?
Well, this is quite relevant to our real world. Consider hive as a city, society, or a country. Just like we have a person or group of persons regulating over these bodies, hive also have something similar and they are known as witnesses. But who chooses them? It's also quite similar to ours, we chose them, by "we" I mean all of us who uses hive. And to manage hive, we have proposals. Let's discuss them.
Witnesses
Basically, they are hive runners. Not sure what do I mean by that, let me elaborate. So, as we know hive.io is simply a blockchain, and to manage a blockchain we need powerful computers among other things with a lot of tech understanding. And all these things are provided by witnesses, they are the ones who deal with all this fuss. All these transactions on hive are performed by their computers by generating blocks. As they are generating blocks, they also receive HP in rewards which makes them quite powerful but they are already in power. Rewards and prices are also managed by them. These witnesses are chosen by hive users via votes. You will get some witness votes which you should totally use, not necessarily now but maybe later.
Proposals
These are exactly what their name suggests. Hive proposes some bills just like parliament does and you have to on them. These proposals include quite a variety and cover all dapps. They are like certain rules, regulations, barriers, tenders, limits, rewards, and much more. But the thing is all votes are not equal, kind of unfair right, yup but justified. So, again just like upvotes, your HP decides how much value will your vote have. And the reason could be that if a person has a high influence(HP), means he/she is more active on hive and may understand it better in comparison to a newbie, hence, more adequate choices for hive.
Your Keys
So, if you follow this guide from post 1, I've mentioned about hive keys. Where can you find them? Just open that backup file you downloaded at the time of signing up. Now you can see your username, password, which is your master password just like you have a master key of your house. Then you can see your Private Keys. In total there are 4 private keys which are long combinations of numbers and alphabets and your master password also looks similar.
Owner Key: This is the most important key as it has the most power and the privileges to change your password, change your keys, recover your account. And whenever you perform one of these activities this key will be used for authorization.
Active Key: This is the second most powerful key as it has the privileges to transfer your funds, power up/down, voting witnesses/ proposals. This key will be used to authorize these transactions.
Posting Key: This key has the privileges to post, comment, vote, reblog, follow, which means whenever you do one of these things this key will be used to grant permission for these transactions.
Memo Key: This key will allow you to send/view encrypted messages on transfers.
All these keys provide security on the basis of each level and you don't have to worry about managing them as keychain extension does that for you. Once you have imported your keys and I mean posting keys to the extension(which you already did at the time of setting up the keychain extension, if not then refer to post 1 for this process), your keys will be implemented whenever necessary. Sometimes you need your own hive password which you set up while adding the extension for additional security. Don't provide your keys to any external sites until or unless you trust them. Consider it very important as you know not your keys, not your crypto. So, back up these keys in the best way you can because if they go missing then it will be a major problem.
Beneficiaries
Beneficiaries are those people who you can add to your post and they will earn a specific percentage of rewards. This percentage can be set by you in the advance section below in your post while writing. You can add your friends, family, authors you like or follow, or any other person on hive. Once added you can also remove them and they can be different people for different posts.
Communities
Communities are like pages or groups or a channel. When you like a specific topic, you follow some pages, channels or join some groups. Similar to that you can join some communities, yes more than one, and can post your content in those communities. You can post in more than one community but your post should be related to what the community is about, not like your posting some pure crypto-related content in an anime community.
Well, all that being said, it will be a little bit easier to join and understand hive. And yes, this is not all, you can always learn more and should also encourage others too. For now, I'm wrapping this guide here but there's a lot on hive like games, leofinance, and other dapps, you can always try them, and maybe possible that in the future, I will also post about them. So, go ahead and join hive, if you have missed the first two posts them I'm linking them below.
Post 1: Ultimate Beginner's Guide For Hive | Signing Up And Essentials
Post 2: Ultimate Beginner's Guide For Hive | All About Rewards
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Resources
https://hive.blog
https://wallet.hive.blog/proposals
https://wallet.hive.blog/~witnesses