Introduction - How Hive Works

Introducing @howhiveworks

Earlier today, in block 65745061 my account was created!

The very first lesson, if you look at the transaction itself you'll see this:

I went to peakd.com to create this account, and apparently they quietly add themselves to your account as beneficiaries. While I'm all for supporting these community projects, I just wish it would have been a bit more explicit so that really soured me. In any case, the answer is here: https://peakd.com/me/referrals

At the bottom of the page you'll see Your default beneficiaries and you can just click REMOVE ALL

This really underscores the point I'm trying to make. Many of you will have no idea what 'beneficiaries' are and what that means for your account. Hive is an entire universe, with countless details such as this lost in the background if you're not a fully informed and aware of every single thing there is to know. It takes real time and effort to really understand what's going on. And while we have an entire blockchain full of useful info, it's not the most obvious and accessible to find this information. Only after considerable effort will you actually get comfortable here so this is my effort to help.

Educational Posts

Much like the blurb above, I plan to write educational posts that outline various aspects of the Hive blockchain and teach users more about it. There's a descent amount of material out there already, but nothing really centralized and easy to access so I may pull in some of that existing material as well, but I largely plan to draft new content.

I have a thousand ideas but I'm extremely interested to know what you'd like to know more about. Or even better, maybe it's not about 'learning' anything, but just documenting some of the more complicated processes. Give me some ideas for things that we could either learn more about or would be better served with new documentation.

Learning Posts

In additional to these educational posts where I help you to learn more, I also plan to write 'learning posts' where I ask my own questions and try to learn more about things I'm not as familiar with. From these posts, I'll plan to draft new Educational Posts outlining all the things I've learned.

I'd also love some suggestions for learning posts that you'd like to know more about. My real hope is to get everyone asking these questions so we can get it all on the table and find answers, all documented in the blockchain so we can easily reference it in the future.

Highly Technical

This is a blockchain, literally written in C++, so we are steeped in technology here and many of the 'features' of the blockchain are very technical in implementation. This is an obvious area we could go into considerable detail into, but my focus are the basic users who don't know anything, so posts such as this are of limited use. I do hope to write some more advanced articles such as this, but I always want to keep it in the context of educating the users with less experience.

Of course, I'd love to hear your ideas and know if there are any advanced topics you'd like me to post about. One easy hit would be running a witness, but again few new users will have the interest, or the technical background for that, so again that is limited. Help me to figure out this area better.

Additional Learning

What more could we do from this account? Writing interesting questions and documenting the core features of the blockchain is obvious, but what more could we do? What other areas are there to address that would help to educate the masses and make Hive more accessible, and frankly less intimidating. That's an excellent point, the average person does get quite intimidated when initially approaching Hive so this is largely a way to diminish that and help drive that initial comfort.

Like everything here, this will be largely community driven so I'd love to hear all your thoughts. I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to read my intro post and learn more about the work I hope to undertake.

Conclusion

I hope that I'm able to gain some traction with this account and see interest from the community. I'll quickly start banging out posts and getting some great content out there for people to learn and acclimate to Hive more quickly. I'm working to recall my initial confusion upon arriving here, but I'll rely more on those of you who really did just show up so you can ask the questions you have today. Another huge area I hope to address is to be a resource for people to reach out to with questions. I'd love to be a stable source for people to go with questions, that ultimately turn into well drafted posts documenting our learnings.

Thanks again for your time and I hope to speak with you again soon!