The journey
It is so frustrating when I try to onboard people to HIVE. They see the possible rewards. They write a post or two. They get that first tiny bit of reward money and it is so small that they just decide it isn't for them.
It's frustrating because I know that if they stick with it, find their niche communities and contribute to them they can make money that is actually worth something.
Yes, their initial amounts will be pretty sad and I understand why its hard to get excited over a 0.002HP payout but that is still 0.002HP more than they had yesterday. In order to be able to show people how things can work out I started this account. Well, actually it was unused so I cleaned out the balance and started again. I did that in February of 2023.
Starting from nothing
Starting from nothing sucked. With absolutely nothing in my account posting was a real challenge and I was forever running out of resource credits. Upvoting was just a luxury I couldn't afford at that time. I made my one post a day on Actfit and limited it to one image and waited for my daily reward that barely qualified as dust. I chose Actifit because if you get your 5000 or more steps you get an upvote with even low effort posts. I did try hard to make good posts because I was trying to set a good example on how to start and get ahead on HIVE>
WAIV was a godsend of a boost. At the time it was $5 for sending a coffee cup image with a story. That got me enough HP to actually do work on HIVE. Hive Learnens was also a huge boost. Get verified, do my best on the writing prompts and the lazy panda would come by and give an upvote.
Proof of value
Of course one question I'm often asked is. Is HIVE really something you can spend. When I go into how you actually go from having HIVE and HP again I see people's eyes gloss over. What did I do to make it a little more concrete to people I show? After my first year I actually moved all my earnings off HIVE to start over. I converted my HP to Hive. My HBD to HIVE. I moved all my HIVE to the Hive-engine to get swap.hive. Then I converted my swap.hive to swap.ltc. Then I moved the swap.ltc to a crypto.com wallet. Then I moved my swap.ltc to my crypto.com credit card.
Now when people ask "How do you spend you HIVE" I give them a quick answer that they can understand. I simply bring out my Crypto.com credit card and say "Move your crypto to this credit card and spend it like cash or withdraw the money from an ATM". People tend to understand that. Move money from one account to another and then spend it. If I'm asked I can get into details on the how to...but once I've put the visual in their mind it sticks as real.
Peak-D has some awesome tools
Have you ever looked at the analytics portion of Peak-D? I knew it was there but rarely look at it.
However it is a powerful tool to show where things were and how it grows slowly over time. As you can see I took out money from my account last year just before my first trip to the Philippines in October 2024
Well I guess the first image just shows that I didnt have much in the account before my trip. This image shows where I took money out to "start fresh". Just look at the inflection point.
Breaking 1500
It took a while but its been a steady climb and that's what regular effort on Hive can do. Yes, I absolutely could do better than that. If I was a full time Hivian and put more effort into making relationships, finding different communities to post in and really work the system I'm certain I could make each post more valuable. That isn't my goal though. I just want to show people that making money on HIVE is certainly possible. However there is one thing that has recently cropped up and I'll tell you what it is and my "work around".
KE ratio.
Now the KE ratio is just a measure of how much HP you have versus how much you have earned on the system. The higher the ratio the bigger the drain you are on the overall economy. As you can see mine is hovering at 2.75 right now. Not great. However if you go back to when I made the big withdrawl I shudder to think how bad the ratio would be.
In that regard you have the option on how to receive your payout. 100% HP is one option. 50/50 HP/HBD is the other option. I choose 50/50 for a couple of reasons. First: I can stake that HBD and get 15% return which is nice. Second: I can convert the HBD to HP and then stake it. If I do that it shows I got less HP and I staked more HP which drops my KE ratio.
Eventually I'll try to get my KE ratio down under 1 but for now? I'll just keep posting and staking so anyone who is looking won't see me as a drain on the system. When I remove the money next time? Hopefully it will be to fund a dApp which hopefully shows the whales and curators on HIVE I am using my payouts to help grow the infrastructure.
KE is a good baseline metric but it doesn't show the whole story :)
Where do I go from here?
If you look hard you will see that most of my HP is delegated to other groups. There are far better curators than I am who do a far better job than I could at giving upvotes. In that regard I'll keep on delegating out all the HP I get.
However, I'm also looking at making a dApp which will use the GLD token so I'm actively supporting the token until the time that I can make it a useful altcoin.
Keep on posting,
Keep on earning,
And show people what work and dedication can do.
Anyways that's my little rant for the day.
Thanks for Hive-Learners for helping me immensely along this journey