Powering up for HivePUD January 1 2021

Happy New Year! And the first of the month means it’s also HivePUD January 1 2021 (aka Hive Power Up Day) over on the Hive blockchain. Ever since I took over the reins of Hive Power Up Day back in June 2020, I’ve gotten lazy about writing a post about my own power ups. I did manage one in November, and I did one just on my Hive blog (although technically on my LeoFinance blog) in December, but didn’t cross post it to my WordPress blog. However I decided that with the new year, I would start posting to my “regular’ and “crypto” blogs on the first of each month, starting with today.

And as I said when I first shared about #HivePUD and powering up on my WordPress blog a couple of months ago, I’d planned to share more things like this in the hopes that if there are bloggers/readers who are becoming intrigued with the idea of owning their data & monetizing their content, that my posts might help to answer some questions.

Now, to recap again some of the information I had in that November post –

What is HivePUD?

As I always say in my Announcement posts that I put out the week before the first of the month, Hive Power Up Day has been taking place on the first day of every month since it’s inception on that other blockchain over a year ago. For the community as a whole, it’s a great way to show support for our blockchain home by staking (aka powering up) Hive and adding to its value.

Also, here’s a little bit from my September 1st post –

Also, after chatting with someone the other day, I realized I don’t think I’ve ever really put into words what it means to me personally to power up Hive – I mean yes, I’ve obviously thought about it, but I was asked, “Why do you want to see people powering up their Hive?” and it took me a minute to figure out an answer to that pretty simple question.

I ended up saying (which I’ve edited a bit to try to make me sound smarter, of course) that I believe Hive has the ability to grow far beyond our current expectations, and it’s encouraging to me to see other people (from whales to the tiniest fish in the Hive ocean) powering up, as it shows we all share the same long term vision for our blockchain home.

And as we saw with what happened on that other blockchain, the more we all power up, the more voice we all have in governance (higher stake means your vote counts for more), so we can have our say in things like top witnesses, proposals, and such. Plus there’s something to be said for the financial benefit of bigger curation rewards, and earning passive income from the interest off our stake.

What does it mean to power up?

In the simplest terms, it’s taking Hive (the cryptocurrency) that you’ve either bought or earned, and investing (aka, staking, aka powering up) it, which then means you can’t sell/transfer it all for a minimum of 13 weeks. However, it does make your upvote (think of a Facebook “like” that has actual monetary value) bigger, and gives you a bigger say in the governance of the blockchain.

(and yes, to my Hive friends reading, I know that’s a way, way, way simplified overview but I think it serves the purpose here. Feel free to shout out if you know of a better way to explain it – I’m always on the lookout for easy explanations for our somewhat confusing cryptocommunity).

My power up

I’ve actually been saving all the Hive and HBD (Hive Backed Dollars) I’d earned from my blog posts and curation to power up today, so I managed to do twice my normal monthly amount. I’m not sure I’ll be able to manage this every month, but to kick off the new year, I’ve powered up 222.222 Hive (double the 111.111 I did monthly for most of last year).

Now, to make it official, here’s my screenshot…

How much did it cost to power up?

Not a penny. While I have invested somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 USD over the three years I’ve been blockchain blogging, I haven’t had the chance to buy any Hive for quite some time. Since the price is pretty low at the moment, I’m hoping to make another investment some time in the near future (buy the dip!), but every bit of Hive I powered up today came from content I created, or curation rewards from upvoting other people’s content. Oh, and some came from wicked awesomesauce Hive people on Twitter who gave me some @hivetips for tweets they liked. 🤩

I think that about sums everything up!

Happy Power Up Day!

If you have any questions about my post, please feel free to shout out either in the comment section, or as a private message on any of my social media accounts. And since the UTC time for January 1st has past, I’ve already gotten my lovely Hive Buzz notification for this month…