@taskmaster4450: Thanks. Governance is your influence on the blockchain. It's tied to your HP. So the more HP you have, the more you're vote is worth not only for your, your voting power for duration, but in the governance vote, the two main things are the witnesses and the witnesses are your block validators, your block producers, the system we, we have is a top 20 system plus an alternate that's rotated in that handles the block production.
Everybody outside the top 20 becomes an alternate and then it runs through on a cycle basis. Anybody can put forth a. Proposal to get funding out of the Dow, the decentralized high fund as as crim mentioned, and if you get enough votes there, um, then your project will be funded.
The votes again are tied to the age, the high power people have. This is what makes those decisions. So you can sit there and complain about a particular witness. You can complain about a particular project not getting funded, all that stuff. The bottom line is this is a state based system and the direction and the future of many decisions are based upon the voting of one's stake.
If witnesses are doing something you don't like if you increase your stake and you start voting for other witnesses, there can be adjustments over the years. We've seen changes in the top 20 witnesses. Doesn't happen often, doesn't happen all the time, but it does take place.
Ultimately it comes down to, do you want to have any say? In what takes place out here around here, and you can vote one high power and you have an impact. Obviously, if you have 200 high power over one high power, you have greater impact 2000 over 200 same thing. So, collectively, that's where communities that's where groups, they have to look at the high power they have and say, are we being represented and a lot of this starts with the education process as we've mentioned a couple of times here in this inaugural town hall is making people aware and going back to one thing that was asked before.
I think a lot of it Eric goes to promotion. On chain, we have the ability through the social media avenues that we have with Hive to talk about this stuff, we can drop it in threads, people can write articles about it. We can put posts together and discuss this in comment sections of these articles, at least to help with the awareness. And if somebody does post an article about something with governance, others can share it around so maybe new people see it.
@arcange: I would like to add something about governance and witnesses. Something really important. Uh, to know about the role of the top witnesses on top off signing blocks is to secure the blockchain. And this is especially important when it comes to hard forks because the top witnesses are the one that will agree or not on new hardforks, meaning new code implemented in the blockchain.
We saw that when Justin Son was making his hostile takeover, his goal was to gain the control, uh, of at least 17 top witnesses in order to be able to change the code of the blockchain. So when you vote for witnesses, especially top witnesses, when you do governance, you are taking care of the existing blockchain, you are taking care of your assets. And that's why when we have a lot of people from the community voting for witnesses, we reduce the risk of having bad actors gaining control over the blockchain.
@moderator: Witnesses are basically our representatives, both to inside and to the outside. They are securing what we have here and without them we could be easily attacked.
@arcange: That's what we saw at first with Justinson, he tried to gain control over the top 20 witnesses but the community was able to fight back and by people from the community voting for witnesses exercising their governance rights, we were able to bring some legit witnesses back into the top 20 witness and we were close to preventing him from performing this attack.
It was only when Justin Son got help from Binance that we saw that we were kind of (removed) up and we decided to fork. So all users as members of the community have a role to perform by using their governance power.
@moderator: The main reason that we decided to start with this topic, the governance topic is because at a base layer, we need more people to get involved. What's the point of being one of the most decentralized blockchains out there if we don't have an active community that gets involved every single day with governance decisions?
@l337m45732: Maybe you don't have to fully understand exactly how governance on the blockchain work, that's totally fine. We know you drive a car and you don't know how the engine works, maybe you do, but most people don't.
But we're driving this hive engine (hehe) and we don't have to fully understand how it works to be involved. That's my point. You know, we can all be involved, we can all vote, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to get involved.
You cast your witness votes, maybe you update them regularly, it all goes back to the the education aspect of it.
@moderator: Right now we have a very, very mature community, even though Hive is a young chain, so to speak, our community is almost eight years old. So there are people who already have a name here who already have a reputation.
There are new projects. There are new communities. There are communities who have been around for five, six years. We are a very diverse community.
** @khaleelkazi:** I was just gonna, uh, play off of Nifty's point that, you know, not a lot of people drive a car, but they don't know, you know, how the engine works.
If you overlay that to Hive governance voting, a big thing about governance is that you also can set, um, proxy votes. And I think that's, That's kind of a big thing that a lot of people miss, which is that if you build, you know, there's a lot of people that are active on hive and you know of them. A lot of people know crim, a lot of people know our arcange, acidyo, or taskmaster.
And if you trust their judgment. You actually can proxy vote to them, which is kind of like the half measure to getting involved in governance, which is why Nifty's point kind of reminded me of it, where if you say, okay, I'm a Hive user, but maybe I'm not active, on a daily basis, and I'm not going to keep up with the top 20 witnesses and what they're doing for the blockchain, but I know Taskmaster and I trust him, so I'm going to set him as my proxy vote. And I think it's worthwhile to kind of educate people about that point also.
@moderator: It doesn't matter how involved you are. As long as you get active, either by casting your votes on the witness list or on the DHF proposals, you can do so, or you can just set someone to be your voice.
And I see Manu, uh, with the hand up. I also want to prompt you, uh, for, for us for a specific topic, Manu. I was mentioning how communities are becoming a force on Hive. Yes, you have the whales, you have the established communities, but you also have the new communities that are starting to make a name for themselves.
And these communities can have at an individual level, they can have a small high power, but together they can have a real impact on what gets done or how the votes go on the blockchain. It doesn't matter if you're a whale, if you don't have a community, or if you don't have, or if you are not part of a community, there is a chance that another community, for example, Hive Cuba, and that's why I actually wanted your opinion on this.
Communities are having much more, much more influence right now. And as time goes by and the members are committed and have a long term vision for Hive, these communities will play a very key role on how governance works, maybe in five years, maybe in 10 years.
Uh, Manu, we cannot hear you. Maybe you want to drop from the spaces and join again. Just ask to speak. And I will pass on the mic. Uh, we have WOO in the house who hasn't spoken yet. Hey man, do you have anything to add to the conversation?
@wrestorgonline: Yeah, actually, I have a few things I'd like to talk about. Uh, Hey guys, uh, thanks for inviting me to the space.
I know some of you guys might, might know about our project wrestling organization online, otherwise known as woo. What we're looking to do is we're looking to leave wrestling a better place than we found it. Uh, and we're able to do that with the hive blockchain.
It's actually been really amazing to see how Hive really pushes their projects, and I want to speak about, we've been talking about governance and voting.
What about voting on the value plan proposal that has just been released a few days ago? That value plan is incredibly important to the growth of Hive. It allowed us, as wrestling organization online to go to the rare Evo convention in Denver, have a presence there where we can make connections, have our wrestlers meet other people, and you'd be surprised how many people in the crypto community know who our wrestlers are and are excited to meet them.
We were also able to go to the breathe convention in Vegas. And what we did at the Breathe convention in Vegas brings, brings tears to my eyes because it leaves my heart so full again, our mission is leaving wrestling better than we found it.
One of our partner wrestlers, Perry Saturn has found himself in a really hard place. Uh, he hasn't been out, uh, to, to see the wrestling community for about 20 years now. Hasn't been on TV for about 20 years. Hasn't seen a lot of those wrestlers and the comrades that he has, uh, and the people that care about him.
And we brought him to, to Vegas and reconnected him with some of his friends like, uh, Sonny Ono and, um, and Disco Inferno. And seeing the smile on Perry's face when he was back around people that cared about him, I literally was in the Uber ride on the way home. Saturn and sunny up front and and tears were in my eyes because my heart was so full I felt so good and that is something that is directly a result of hive It is a direct result of the community the vast hive community coming together and making this work for us Uh and and in changing people's lives We were able to save perry saturn's house for being taken from him. That is real change that is real positive change and we're able to do that with the community and with governance, uh, with people voting on proposals and that's why we are a witness.
I believe we're in the top 60 ish, maybe 62 or something like that as a witness. And we've been around for just over a year but we want to give back to the community. We all grow in this together. We're all in the same boat together. Let's rise together. Uh, and so having these Twitter spaces is huge to get the information out there to the regular people.
It's also huge to get us together to speak to each other. And if you see some of these accounts and some of these projects that you aren't following, go follow them, you know, share this space out on your Twitter, share it out with your community, get the word out there and, and let's grow this baby. Woo.
@crimsonclad: So forget the value plan stuff for a second. Although, you know, honestly, Booker bringing that up is a great point. One of the things that I think is so awesome and getting to watch this as we go and speaking specifically to that idea of communities becoming an incredibly important part of governance voting.
I think Manu's example of like Hive Cuba becoming essentially like a really important voting block along with our other communities. Here's Wu as an example as well. When you think of the type of people who end up in the blockchain space, disruptive tech, you probably don't immediately think of wrestling fans and that's not a slight, t's just what a different. Style of, you know, approaching entertainment, right?
You're watching athletes, you're out in physical arenas. What you're interested in doesn't necessarily immediately correlate with, you know, a nerdy disruptive tech kind of blockchain stack. And yet here is Hive building a crossover where games and social feedback loops exist, where communities end up pulling together because you can share whatever the heck you want on the blockchain and the more that we kind of create these fun places for people to gather that are more equitable like forums or front ends or What have you social spaces where people gather around a common interest? They become a community that potentially has a completely Different set of values and it's one of the reasons that hive is so poised to have such a strong, such a strong governance mechanism.
And it's not just the tech side of things. It's because specifically this blockchain builds a really incredibly varied and distributed user base. Every vote you make, forget about governance, even on witnesses and DHF, every vote you make every day is distributing hive to different people around the world and actually decentralizing this block chain further.
So when you start bringing in groups that come together around. Uh, a different set of interests is something like wrestling. You are suddenly opening up this space that we're saying we want to see diversified every day, distributed every day. You're opening it up to a group of people you wouldn't have been able to reach in any other way, which is the coolest part about our DAPs and our different groups, whether they're cultural, whether they're interest based, whether they're service based, however it is that these communities with different approaches, different interests, different people, however they come to the blockchain they have this social feedback loop where they can talk where they can gather and where yeah they can actually kind of decide here's what we want to see let's all vote for it and so for me WOO is a great example of people who would have never never never found our blockchain space who now find someone that either they've watched in the past that have ties to their childhood that compete in a sport that they're interested in, or they get drawn in buying, you know, the magical cardboards, the trading card game, and they love that aspect of it. And I really am excited to see how each of these communities brings people that we would not have had otherwise, it's crowdsourcing and crowdfunding knowledge in a way, which I think is huge for balanced governance.
@moderator: Exactly. And just like crims says, forget about all of the rewards from posts and, and, and from, from comments and all of that, every vote you cast as an individual is telling or is signaling, Hey, I want you to have a bigger say on the governance, I want you to have more hype tokens so that whatever you stand for. You have a bigger influence, so the more that we spread hive as a token with the community, the more that we have to into account what is the hive that is being spread used for.
So if you align with someone, even if they post, you could say low quality stuff. If they align with what what you think is best for the blockchain, that is also value. So the best part of this decentralized space is that anyone can do whatever they want with their vote.
@manu.photos: Thank you first for inviting me. I wasn't sure I would be here because of my work and now I'm on the street.
So if you hear any sound, uh, sorry. Sorry for that. I'm in Cuba and in a a bit loud place. Um, I wanted to talk about how Cuba and in a way, how it has empowered many Cubans in many different ways because we are not just a trading card game or a focused community on any topic. We are just a community for everyone in the country that are welcome to play a game or create content or vote for the content or anything that they do.
I wanted to speak about the previous topic that it was about witnesses and boarding. Um, there's something that we need to do with this uses that sometimes they don't know about, what a witness is or how they can hit with their votes to maintain the And I think we need to approach that from every single community that we have.
Because Hive, we need to remember that Hive is a big community, but it is a big community made from many communities. So, not everyone can know what a witness is, but we can, he can know about it from another friend that is doing the same.
I know they are both playing a game, or they are both in a community that is about content, about Cuba or that's just, I don't know, posting pictures on Hive. People should tell them about in any way. Maybe we can do a mechanism for marketing for inside marketing or Hive. We should think about and how to approach that, I wanted to say I don't have much time, but I Also wanted to say that we have a something that's really good for this And it's our reputation system that is based on every Single thing that we do, every single interaction transaction that we do on our blockchain and it's something that sometimes people forget.
People forget to see that number when someone is commenting or reaching them and people need to know more about that because that's the way we can know that we are talking to someone that is, uh, actually not a bot. There is a real person that has... Some value or has bring some value to, uh, to the blockchain, to the community or wherever he's, he's at in any places or, uh, so somehow tell more about, uh, our communities there, uh, tell a little more about this because people need to know how this works and how they can use it to be more safe in our space and for that to know how people are using our blockchain, how they're contributing, how a witness has become a witness in the top 20 or is doing it because he just wants to help the blockchain.
And that's how Hivecuba has become a witness. Because we just have the enough amount to our curation project, just, uh, have a server and be a witness. No matter how many votes that we get on our witness, we will be, uh, we will always keep our witness servers on. Because just, just because we can, because we wanted to help our blockchain. So, uh, no... I don't know if many witnesses do it, uh, that way, because that was our way to contribute the, the trust that the blockchain has provided us.
@moderator: Exactly. And just like Manu says, it's all about getting the small user, the little guy to get involved. It doesn't matter how much Hive you have. Getting involved and having as many witnesses as possible. It doesn't matter how far or how close you are from, from the top 20.
The more witnesses we have means that at least at one point they will run a block, and that means the blockchain is getting more decentralized. At one point we used to have around 120 active witnesses. Right now I don't have the number, but I see the top 100 have a lot of inactive witnesses. If you are voting for any inactive witness or anyone who hasn't updated their feed or, or done anything related to, to being active in the, in the blockchain governance, you should change all of your votes.
Crim, I know you have to leave very soon. So I have a question for you that, that I think the community will be glad to hear.
Right now it seems like we are playing the governance game, but also Anyone who has something to add to the conversation that might not be positive or might someone in a bad light It seems like people are doubting into doing it or not because of course we are a transparent blockchain everyone can know who said what and there might be some fear of retaliation or thinking that you're a toxic person or that you're a problematic person.
How how can we encourage people to be more vocal no matter how much state they have without thinking there's going to be consequences.
@crimsonclad: Yeah, that's a doozy. Um, yeah, I think we're doing okay. We're doing okay for time because there's normally first Monday of the month is the core dev meeting where we kind of get as many of our core developers and really technical people together to do a live stream meeting for that.
But we we did cancel it today because a bunch of us are here. So yeah, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to talk about timing. But, um, you know, that's a doozy of a question, and it's one of those things where going back to our very first town halls very, very early six years ago or whatever, um, I have this thing that I haven't been able to do for a long time, and it's, it's, I clap for emphasis, and I'll tell you the easiest way to handle this when you need to speak your mind.
Kindness costs nothing.
You can say whatever you want, and we encourage you to do that here. Just think about how you frame it. It's as simple as that. You know, I think Hivefest and in person gatherings are the most perfect example. I can think of people who on chain, I really don't get along with, or I don't agree with, and I don't like.
And we've never really had a bad run in. But these are people who, you know, if you asked me, uh, no thank you, that's fine, I'll pass. Then, you meet them in person and you realize, nope, you are reading what's on chain with your own personal bias. And this is something that is so difficult for humans, this is not a hive thing, this is not a blockchain thing. This is a human thing. And one of the things I like to say about Hive a lot is it's a human blockchain. It's human tech built by humans for humans, and then we human all over it. So, you know, there are some very real concerns about, oh, no, somebody is going to be really mad at me if I say something or somebody is going to downvote me.
And one of the hardest shifts to make in our space is thinking about the way that you read and the way that you write, in that we do still On-chain, commit things to text and it can be a little tricky because you're really always going to have an opinion in your head and when you read somebody else's words, you're going to kind of overlay that opinion on it.
And so often you'll find a lot of the exchanges that feel like they're getting heated or things that kind of spiral when they shouldn't are because people are projecting that worry onto the conversation. So my best advice to you to start is simply always just assume the other person isn't trying to personally hurt your feelings.
Um, and that's a really hard thing. All, all of life, that's good advice. And it's hard to do. I'm bad at it also. I will say, you're going to have some opinions that people don't like. You are going to have beef with other people. That is inevitable in a space where humans gather and especially in a space where humans are trying to come to consensus on anything, whether it's technological or not.
When you add Distribution and rewards to the sort of mix. It gets a little messier yet. So there's, there's two things that I can say to you. And the first one I have, which is, you know, do your very best to just assume that somebody is not coming for you. They will probably really make it clear if they are.
And I know because I get a lot of those messages. But the other thing is, remember that this blockchain doesn't force you to be nice people are always worried about down votes, and I think I think that's fair But only to a degree, because at the end of the day, as much as it does hurt, and, and everybody goes, Oh, well you're a big account, so downvotes don't hurt you.
But as much as it does hurt to think there is a positive visual form of feedback to you that was not, you know, not encouraging. A downvote, a flag, looks and feels bad. It feels bad to us as people. But it also... It doesn't stop you in any way, and in most cases, most cases, downvotes are often one offs because somebody doesn't agree with your saying, and they are not huge.
The second that you sort of kind of brace yourself and get over the fact that you're going to get a downvote at some point on this chain, you kind of gain a superpower. And you start realizing that it's okay, because no one can stop me from saying this opinion. And it gives you a chance to kind of reflect, how, how important is this opinion to me?
And, you know, if I'm worried about getting downvoted for it, should I be talking to other people? Should I find more people who also hold this opinion? You know, am I so far out to lunch? Is this something that we just, not enough people right now are thinking about? So, I'm not suggesting that you all go out and yell at each other and get, you know, downvoted into oblivion.
But there's two ways to take it. You can only control yourself, which means how you speak to other people and how you frame your arguments, but also how you read what other people are saying. Everyone here is passionate about this blockchain and about some topic, which gets them a little riled up. Um, but the biggest thing that I kind of want to help people dispel is, there's a chance you're going to get a downvote out there.
I don't think that it's worth it, in most cases, to silence yourself based on that. And, you know, the flip side is, is everybody goes, well, a whale will rocket me into the ground and destroy me. Take a look around the chain. And take a look around sort of how many accounts that's actually happened to and then look at sort of the conversation that's happening that's led them there and you'll see.
Usually the few places that this does happen, it's because people are incredibly heated, incredibly, um, there are interactions that in the real world, if we're happening face to face, would be incredibly problematic, and even then, you are still able to go read those conversations because are not removed from the blockchain.
Their opinions are not removed, but you can come to that consensus as a group of do I want this around me or not? Um, so I mean, this will never be an easy topic. There's no way around it, but I think in a lot of cases we do so much internal worrying and internal projecting of our fears and our concerns and our insecurities that this is another space for communities to kind of come together.
You know, if you're a little worried about your opinion or you're really Scared of seeing something one of the best things that you can do in real life and on the blockchain is Asking your friends and a few people in the wider community that you, you know, you touch upon because it turns out the more that you speak to other people, the more you're going to understand your own opinion.
And you're either going to build up support behind it, or you may change your mind a little bit. But I think that comes back to what's really good about the social feedback on Hive and where communities are going to come into play for people to feel more comfortable expressing their opinions.
@moderator: And I do think that the key takeaway, I mean, not that everything that you said wasn't important, but the key takeaway here is that 90 percent of the replies or the response that you will get depends on how you frame it and how you proceed in talking about the topic.
@crimsonclad: It's a skill. It's a skill that you always got to work on. It's, uh, that's not a hive thing specifically.
@moderator: Yes. Thanks, Karim, for that take. Um, I do want to get back to the communities, uh, side of things and how. How that's one of the main foundations that we we've had for seven years, but that it's going to take a bigger role in the future, and Khal, I know that you are a big proponent. Of, of communities as a, as an influence, um, core and how they can change how Hive works. Do you want to add to that conversation?
@khaleelkazi: Yeah, I think, um, you know, kind of echoing on, on what Crim said, if you have conversations with people, it really can change your perspective.
I saw that firsthand when I went to Hive Fest last week, um, and met a lot of you guys for the first time. Um, so when you look at that from the community layer, getting involved in the community is, is really what changed my perspective on this blockchain and got me more involved in the legacy chain, uh, and everything we used to do there.
I found different little pockets of, of people that kind of talked about the same thing and obviously back then we were kind of. Conform to just long form, you know, writing blog posts and commenting on each other's blog posts, but even back then there were creative ways to kind of get involved with each other.
You know, we would ping each other on each other's comment sections and stuff like that. But nowadays we have these like really powerful community features. Whether you look at, you know, peakD's UI or ecency or Leo's UI, there's tons of ways to see the different communities and, and join them and create content in them and overall put your name out there.
I think that's a huge way to. Also lead into governance, because, you know, when you start building out your network and you get familiar with different people, you start to kind of not necessarily just adopt their views, but actually just think about their views and, you know, learn from them and see what they have to say about different witnesses, um, see what they have to say about different proposals.
I think the community, the hive mind or the, the brain power behind the community, uh, is a really important thing to tap into, and I think communities themselves, you know, the, the individualized communities are a great way to kind of organize people around different ideas, uh, and, and then drive those into government governance decisions.
@moderator:Right on. And for those who are, who are listening and you want to chip in the conversation, just ask to speak. This is not a closed space. Anyone can speak. The town hall is supposed to be where anyone, no matter who you are, you can just have your takes if you don't feel comfortable with voice remember we have a thread cast where you can just add whatever.
And we, we will start reading them. There's 420 comments already, but we will go through them. Uh, Leo finance will, we'll vote some of it will curate some of the good ones. Uh, probably some of the. Of the, of the speakers will do as well. I was going to say taskmaster is pretty, pretty silent. Uh, he's got us very used to having a lot of takes on things, but nifty, do you want to come in?
@l337m45732: Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, if you, if you have something to say, even if you don't like, you know, if you're not tech savvy or don't quite know how things work, speak up. You know, we're all, we're all part of the same family here. We're all headed towards the same direction. We all want the best for this ecosystem.
And it's better for you to not stay silent, speak, you know, uh, put your hand up, ask a question if you don't know how something works, someone in the community does just ask. No one's going to judge you. No one's going to, you know, make you feel uncomfortable if you just want to speak on anything. So, just wanted to put that out there.
@taskmaster4450: One thing I wanted to add about Cal, and I'll get a little bit, uh, futuristic here if I can for a second. Uh, communities are, are important because I believe... This is a precursor in the future to DAOs. We are going to see a lot of the communities that are forming over time will evolve into DAOs as different facets of technology are integrated.
We know that, generative AI is starting to take off. We know there's different things and being centralized with regulators and government agencies isn't a great thing. So, Puts a target on your chest. So there's a variety of reasons and factors feeding into this, but when we start to look at where things can be in five, seven, 10 years, uh, it's going to be a vastly different world technologically, and this is really paving away and to a certain degree, you can make a case and I think it would be a valid case that that hive itself is a DAO and your stake, your governance vote, even though it's human, it does release automated features. It releases, you know, the payouts of the reward pool. It releases, uh, you know, and updates the witness voting to the moment.
It releases funding from the DHF. And we may over time see more of that, whether it be at the base layer or whether it be with these layer two side chains and things that are being created there. You know, eventually we're going to have smart contracts. It could be related to NFTs. I mean, we don't know where all of this is going to go, but that's the direction things are headed in.
And so it's important to get some of these basic fundamental habits, if you will, ingrained in us to look at the DHF, uh, proposals occasionally to look and review your witness votes occasionally to make sure you are staking as much as you can, comfortably. So you are growing your influence on chain, especially if you are building something.
And also as a community. That like Manu was talking about with Hive Cuba as a community or the WOO community or the Leo community or the basket weaving community, the photography community, it doesn't matter what community. That those communities can be represented and it all comes back to that simple premise.
What stake are we collectively voting with and what impact is it going to have? And the final thing I'd say before I'll mute myself again is for those who don't think their vote matters that there isn't a lot, Oh, I don't have much HP.
Well, first off, as we witnessed with the Justin Sun situation.
Even though Justin Sun prevailed in the end, a lot of small token holders united, they voted with the community, and their collective stake did make a difference. So that's the first thing. So do not overlook that. The second thing, Always keep in mind, it's a percentage basis of the total. So if you have 100 HP and you go to 200 HP, you say, well, that's only 100 HP.
But your influence individually just doubled. And if you go from 100 HP to 400 HP, you just 4x your influence. You are not going to see an account, I don't know who the largest account holders, let's say blocktrades, blocktrades is not going to double his stake. I mean, to go from whatever he's at to double, it's not going to happen.
So always keep that in mind. So even if you're at 25 HP. Get yourself to 50 HP, then 100, then 200, then 400. Try to keep working up the scale, because it does have an impact, especially if you start to get into a newer community, like a Hive Cuba or something like that, where all of a sudden, hey, I can make a difference over here.
@bookerman (WOO): I just wanted to kind of kind of add in a little bit what Taskmaster was saying about, uh, increasing hive power, increasing your voting stake. There's many different ways you can increase it. One way that we have, increased our influence on Hive. Is we offered HP delegation rewards.
So if you, uh, delegate your HP to wrestling organization online and we could use that HP to curate our community and, and, and give back rewards to our community, we gave you some woo token. We're still actually offering this. But by doing that, we've increased our hive power to just under 200,000.
I want to say we only hav about 10,000 hive power staked, and there's about 180,000 delegated. And using that proxy votes, there's many different ways that you can increase your influence, increase your distribution, and have a bigger say, and the nice thing is about Hive is I'm not a developer.
I just had a developer meeting, during this Twitter space, too. Uh, but I, half the stuff, I, I don't know what that's all about. I'm, I am a, more of, in a leadership role. I, I come from film and television, uh, and, and film production. So I'm more in working with people to make something, bringing their talents in and creating something cool.
And we've been lucky enough to do that. And we've been able to do that by using tools, uh, that are available, uh, through some of the great developers like yeah, but Matt, even Aggie, and his Hive Engine and, and Tribal Decks, and allowing, uh, new projects to enter the space and not be intimidated.
Because the big thing is, like, when you're, when you're a new project, and you're trying to get into Web 3, and you're not a developer, it's, it's, the door is closed to you in most places. You either need a big hose of money, or you need to be a developer. And Hive was not closed off to us. We were able to build our community, talk about wrestling, talk about our partnered wrestlers, build that up.
We were able to release assets, tokens, NFTs, have a marketplace, all for very, very cheaply. It was, it was so beneficial for us as a, as a startup, uh, to start on Hive. I would tell anyone that was starting a new quality project that actually solved a problem, I would tell them to build on Hive. I would hands down tell them to build on Hive because you can build a community and you can find people that fit in your community from other people's communities.
For example Pizza Guild. I saw them in here earlier today. Uh, having them... Uh, be a part of, of Woo from the beginning was huge. Uh, it allowed us a bunch of users that now know about our project that like wrestling and want to talk about wrestling.
And that expands over the broad Hive community.
And so you can, you can find your niche here. You can build here. You can do it way cheaper than you can do it on other chains. You can find quality developers because we do have many quality developers. Um, there's so many that are here right now. Uh, but there's so many that are just in the back end, just coding away.
Uh, and as you guys were saying earlier, sometimes they don't have the presence because they're not making a bunch of posts, but they're constantly building on hive. That was just my two cents. I really do love hive. I, I am super, uh, uh, pro hive. I think it's the best chain to start a project on hands down.
And the love that you get from the broader community isn't found anywhere else. That's, that's all I had to say.
@moderator: A hundred percent. And I'm going to start reading out loud some of the questions, uh, on the threadcast. If anyone who's a speaker wants to respond to them, just raise your hand. I'm just gonna go with the first one.
@ura-soul (written): You're solely saying it is well known in marketing psychology that the fear of losing something is far more of a significant impactor that it is the excitement of gaining something. Downvoting was originally only for policy of, of relatively extreme content.
@moderator:I like this, this, uh, this take because 1 thing that we didn't mention, but that it's definitely something that can happen if you don't feel comfortable being vocal about something that you don't like about governance, witnesses, DHF, whatever.
You can always talk to your most trusted witness or, or to someone who aligns with your, with, with the way you think. And you can just tell them, Hey, I noticed this. You as a witness, you are a top 40 witness, you're a top 20 witness. Uh, I don't feel comfortable speaking out. Can you do it for me? And that's what witnesses are.
Part of the responsibility of witnesses is being the voice of the small users. So just reach out to one of these witnesses and tell them, Hey, I feel like this. Can you be vocal about it? And then someone will do it for you if you don't feel comfortable.
I see @thelogicaldude is here. Hey man, do you want to add something to the conversation?
@thelogicaldude:** I wanted to real quick piggyback on WOO's comments about building businesses on Hive. It is absolutely the best chain to do so. I've tried to build on different chains, but I keep coming back to Hive and, you know, so, you know, with Hive List and Blocktunes and Hive Hustlers, it just was the best fit, to really get a business going, whether it's just a.
You know branded blog like hive hustlers has turned out to be and you know, like my, you know, e commerce site like hive list, you know, you there's ton of opportunities out there. So, um, yeah, don't limit yourself.
But my biggest thing and kind of goes to that too is, you know getting Engaged in the community is also extremely important and one thing that small users Tend to be a little, a little wary of is trying to get in and actually jump in and engage with these, you know, with these different accounts, you know, a lot of us are actually looking for feedback from the community because, you know, how are we supposed to know what the community wants without?
You know the feedback from the community. So it's important for small users to really engage and get involved And you know put their say out there kind of thing whether you know It's logical or not, you know, it's you know, there's never a dumb question is what I always grew up saying, you know so, um, but yeah, don't be afraid to get engaged and that's you know, and I see things All the time on how to build yourself individually on hive, you know, and my biggest piece of advice to that is to not worry about your own content At 1st.
Get involved in other people's content. Comment does what a lot of people don't realize is comments are essentially posts. So you can not have a very long opinion about something, you know, if it's on one of the short forms and, you know, you may have to expand, um, on a different front end or something, but, uh, yeah, put your, put your voice out there, get involved because you never know who you're going to get, who you're going to meet, who you're going to get yourself involved with and where it's going to eventually take you.
I never thought that three years ago, I'd essentially be living almost full time on crypto. Well, it's happened and here I am, and I've got a huge community of people that, you know, have helped make that happen, you know, so get out there, get involved. Don't be scared. That's what I had to say.
@moderator: 100 percent and engagement is also a way that you can grow your influence on Hive.
There are many, many stakeholders who. I mean, at first glance would be like, Oh, this guy has 10, 000 high power. This guy has 20, 000 high power. Yes. But his follower base is huge because they engage with other people. They comment, they get involved with the community and their influence within governance is bigger than what their wallet says.
@thelogicaldude: Yeah, you can't always go by what your wallet says because like I said, people like me, we actually live on this stuff. I'm in the middle of a power down now to pay for a cross country move. I'm moving from one side of the US to the other, actually leaving in a couple of hours.
And so, yeah, you can't always go by what's in the wallet. You just, reputation's a good one to kind of go by here, you know, there's some flaws and that. Um, You know, in the reputation numbers and that kind of thing, but it's just what the person is contributing to the blockchain. You can look at all that on chain, like criminal saying earlier, you can verify, you can see what these people are about by what they're posting on chain.
So go by that versus just a wallet amount.
@hugomarcel (written): Everyone on Hive needs to be on this space. I have learned more about the Hive ecosystem on spaces than I have on the blog side of things. People need to know what governance and witnesses are.
@moderator: So how, like, as a big community leader, how can we make these spaces, uh, get more reach?
I mean, we just talked about the planning. We are going to announce this for the next month, uh, with more, with more, with more advanced and pick a time that is better for everyone. But how, how can we, or how can the community get involved in, in pushing this? Uh, far and wide, so that more people attend and more people learn.
We're going to change topics every month. We're going to have dab, uh, guests. We're going to have witnesses that, uh, as guests. So, what's up?
@crimsonclad: So, you're the Twitter expert, my man. Uh, X X expert? That's a terrible portmanteau. Um, to be quite honest, this answer is not a slam. Um, but what I will say is that, uh, the best way to learn is to try and teach if you have the joy for it.
Um, and so We have a lot of people who actually do these types of events, and so the best kind of way to do this is, you know, take a crack at it, come to the ones that you have a chance to come to, obviously, share them around, but realistically, encourage people in your own groups and spaces to build them, and you know, I mean, here we've got Task is here and, you know, John is part of your, um, witness initiative as well.
I mean, there's CTT, which is, you know, the three speak guys doing community token talk, you know, you've got the Crypto Maniacs podcast, you've got, I mean, Even up until this, this last year, um, I was doing every week on Saturday, I was doing a, um, Disruptive Tech podcast called Cyber Buzz and people would come and we would do exactly this.
And so, you know, one of the things that I think is really effective and, you know, do as I say, not as I do, because unfortunately, I got sent so many places for Hive this year that my, my own podcast kind of got pushed to the side. Um, so even when I do resume them. One of the best things you can do is as you're teaching, as you're talking, um, talking about these other spaces as well.
Um, because there is, there's, there's a form of receptiveness and responsiveness that we have when we can hear or see each other that will always be different than text. And part of it is that contextual reading. Um, but a lot of it comes down to word of mouth. How do you find out about things in the public square?
In the real world, and you guys can't see me making air quotes right now, you know, the real world, you talk about it, you talk about what you watched on TV to your friends, you talk about the podcast you listen to on the bus, um, word of mouth is so important, and so one of the best things that I would love to see is the more of these So one of the biggest initiatives that we have, whether that is, you know, the existing spaces, the existing podcasts, the existing streams on chain, is that everybody starts shouting out everybody else in that way, because you do, you remember it a little bit differently when you hear it.
Oh, and @uyobong just suggested that we actually draw like a timetable or a calendar. Um, this might be something that's really awesome. Uh, we have a new account that is started on the blockchain called BuzzParty, which actually is highlighting all of the in person events.
Maybe we can reach out and we can create on some of the front ends a calendar for things like all of these podcasts, x spaces, etcetera, that allows people to kind of jump into wherever somebody's teaching or talking, that fits their schedule. Because certainly, I mean, I'm going to be bringing back my shows on Sunday as well, because people have been, people have been really asking to do that.
And so I think. There's no upper limit on how many of these kinds of events we have. And they will grow quickly if you say, Okay, listen, we had a lot of fun in this x space. If you like this and you like half these people, well, it turns out tomorrow they're going to be over here doing it on this space.
And, uh, and you'll see that that kind of thing, that gains momentum so quickly. It's too easy to miss a text or, you know, something that just flew by in your notifications without you hearing it and having sort of the impetus and understanding the people that will be behind it.
@taksmaster4450: If I can add just 1 thing, what crim said, and not only does it apply to what she's saying, but I think this goes to the. Entire how do we market hive? Or how do we attract people to hide? Nothing attracts people more than success and promoting our successes and whether it's a spaces or whether it's a threadcast or whether it's a show like CTT, Cryptomaniacs, cryptoholics, whatever.
If we start talking about the success and saying, Hey, in the last month's spaces, uh, for the town hall, we had 200 people that lets people know there's something there, their success, and that's how we start building momentum.
I mean, it's one thing to promote stuff, and that's not a bad way to go, but nothing sells like success.
@moderator: And just like crim says, as long as we, well, the moment that we gain momentum, this is going to happen very, very fast. Uh, right now we have a hive Zealy community. Uh, that that is mostly focused on this on rallying the hive community from within the blockchain into web two and into trying to outreach more people and to make people notice hive.
Um, and that's, that's just exactly how, how this, this whole idea of the town hall came to be, we need to be vocal. We need to spread Hive. We need to tell people that Hive exists, um, and for those who are listening right now, if you scroll a little bit under the speakers, you will see that we have the, I don't want to say official because I don't even know if, if, if, if the word applies, but we have the community representative X account, you will see it as Hiveblocks, just click on that and follow if you are not following, Uh, and just be on the lookout because this is the account where the hive community puts out, uh, all of the important announcements and all of the things to be aware of.
So if you haven't followed them, go do it now, please. If you are very kind, I'm just searching on the threadcast for more, for more, um, for more comments.
@princessbusayo: Don't laugh at me, please. When I first joined Hive and saw Arcange asking to be voted as a witness, I thought he was a scammer, but now that I have seen, now that I've learned about it, and now that I know more about Hive, I know who he is.
@moderator: The point here is people don't know what witnesses are and what, what are, what is the purpose of witnesses. So, um, yes, I don't know if someone else wants to add anything to the conversation here. I'm just going to go on a rant reading comments from the audience. But if someone else wants to add something, now's the time.
I'm going to put you on the spot, Nifty, and say that you want to say something.
@l337m45732:** Yeah, I, I just unmuted anyway, so I beat you to it. Um, in a, in a non, uh, hard to understand way, the witnesses are our community representatives. They're, they're the people that are voted in by everyone that has a stake on Hive, that has any amount of Hive power.
Anyone can vote even if you only have one Hive power. So the witnesses are the voice of, of community and they're the ones looking out for the best interest of the blockchain. And keeping it running. So if you don't vote for witnesses do yourself a favor,, you can do it from peak D you can go to, uh, you know, your witness votes that I can't think of exactly how to get there at the moment.
Um, but yeah, you can go to your witness votes and, and you can take a scroll through and see if you recognize any of those names there. And, you know, if you do go ahead and give them some support. I know hive Cuba has one. I know Leo finance has one, of course, a town hall-will be live very soon. Um, so yeah, go support the people that are active, go support the people that are speaking on these spaces outward, you know, to, to beyond hive, uh, not, not necessarily the echo chamber.
Um, yeah, so definitely if you don't vote for any witnesses or don't know how to do that, reach out to one of us. Make your vote count.
@thelogicaldude: So just to piggyback on that, and to not forget our second layers too, so some of the, uh, witnesses don't, uh, some of the people that operate, say, you know, side... Uh, like myself, uh, we don't necessarily have a full hive witness, but we may actually support the second layer.
So check that out too. Not to complicate things any further, but Hive Engine does also have a witness structure as well. You have to have the workerbee token to vote for that. Uh, and that also earns you some of their B token too. So definitely make sure to do not forget the Hive Engine witnesses because we are also working really hard to secure the second layer.
@moderator: Yeah, I cannot echo this more. Uh, yes, the high governance is important, but as we grow and as we evolve, there's going to be a lot of layer twos and a lot of dApps that will need the involvement of, of the token holders. So just like the logical dude says, you not only need to vote on the layer one, there are also a lot of layer two, uh, places where, where, where we need to be decentralized.
@brando28 (written):Question about supporting multiple witnesses is my vote power divided between them. Are those the same spot or does the same power support each one.
@moderator: to answer that question. If you have 1000 HP and you vote for 30 witnesses, your 1000 Hive power will support all of them with 1k HP.
So you are not dividing it, you are using all of your high power for each of your 30 witness votes.
@bitcoinflood (written): I don't think it's much to ask a witness to post about what they are doing once a month to keep everyone informed as to what they are doing, even if it's as simple as, Securing the chain.
@crimsonclad: I'm gonna just kind of throw in here. Um, I actually agree with you wholeheartedly But I will say from the opposite side of it. Um, how how it can happen that This may not be the case, so some of you guys may know, some of you may not, uh, from the legacy chain forwards, I was a consensus block producer for more than five years, uh, so basically right through the split and right up till recently, I was one of the top 20 witnesses, um, I will tell you, Boy, oh boy, did I suck at posting.
And in general now, I suck at posting. And it is actually soul crushing, to be quite honest. Um, it's, it's difficult because depending on the role that you take on, Uh, how you are perceived and how your posts do is another weird thing that kind of happens. So I'm just going to throw this out there is nobody's actually really immune to overthinking about things like downvotes and upvotes and this that and the other thing.
Um, but for me personally, uh, I usually work about six hours a day on Hive stuff. Uh, and by the time that I get back to just Should I make a post explaining that today I took some more meetings and did, you know, my software is good? Is that adding to the conversation? No, it's not. Um, you know, and part of that comes back to the expectation that witnesses also be contactable in You know as the flip side and I think and hope that I'm open and accessible to everyone, But I will say as somebody who really really struggled with that balance because of the enormity of work that I take on Um, i'm not sure what the right answer is there But one thing that always played on my mind and that became actually a little bit problematic and probably something that we can talk about.
When I did make a post, it would get So many votes. Too many votes, to be quite honest, for a witness update. It would make way too much rewards. And that became something that, incredibly problematic in that, you know, for some people they felt, well, here's another witness just getting voted on by everyone and making all this money.
And it actually bred a little bit of resentment. Um, and that became something that has played in my mind a lot about how I approach when I communicate on chain. The problem is when you do kind of become a, Um, somebody that's recognized or often that, you know, I guess is liked or whatever. Um, sometimes your posts are over rewarded and that's fine but it, for people who aren't really aware of that relationship, it feels either disheartening or upsetting or in a lot of cases people feel that they're sort of collusion or circle jerking and these are all these sort of really complex topics that don't come to mind until you get deep into Hive and you've spent some time here.
Um, but it's a part that impacts governance that I think about quite a lot, especially on my own behalf. Um, and I don't have a great answer for that. But in terms of, you know, if I've got X amount of time today to spend on Hive tasks, is it gonna be rewriting the same automated post twice a week and just powering along that way, or is it going to be actionable stuff?
And for me, I've chosen actionable stuff, and, and so I think there's probably going to be a lot of feedback where people tell me, well, you've chosen wrong. Um, and I'll be interested to hear that, because now, at current, um, I'm not actually witnessing.
My approach to things has kind of calmed down a bit, because I don't have that same sort of, community requirement, uh, if you want to call it that. So, yeah, I, I'd kind of be interested to hear, is there a time or a place where you think it is okay that witnesses don't give magically, sort of weekly consistent updates or super consistent updates?
Or no, it should happen, and what does that look like?
** @kenechukwu97 (written):** This is the first shot at this town hall meetup. And everything already looks well planned and organized.
@moderator: Oh, believe me, uh, we want this to be more professional and we want this to be more, uh, to have a better flow. Yes, this is the first time that we're doing it. We hope to get better at it.
Going back to the topic that crim is saying, one of the main goals of this town hall would be to have, let's say we have 20 top witnesses and 10 backup witnesses. And for those who don't know, the top 20 are the ones that run most of the chain. Then the backup witnesses are from the 21 to the 30, which run some blocks in between the top 20.
And then you have all the other, uh, witnesses and depending on the, on the rank that they are means how many blocks during a day or during a week they actually process.The point of this town hall would be, so let's say we have 30, uh, with witnesses at the top, maybe bringing five, maybe bringing six every, every three months, every quarter, every six months, whatever, and just have them share.
Hey, I am a witness number seven, my name is Pedro and I'm going and I do this for the chain and then this, this actually takes off that weight from their backs of having to, "Oh, I have to, uh, share with the community what I'm doing or who I am or for the newbies who come and do not know what I do."
Well, maybe you can just come here, every three months and just speak about your witness, what you do, just take 15 minutes and that's it. And the point is to push this Town Hall to everyone, so nobody misses it.
@khallelkazi: I was just gonna echo on, uh, something Crim said, which is, uh, and, and, you know, the general topic, which is, you know, getting More updates from, from the top 20, um, and we kind of talked about it at the beginning too, is, you know, a lot of the top 20 are not active in terms of posting and stuff, you know, in terms of posting and just in general, like communication, but you know, that's not necessarily a bad thing and I don't think that, you know, you should just rule out a witness and say, Oh, they haven't made a post in the last, you know, six months, they must not very active.
A lot of them are active at a more technical or kind of background layer. But that being said, I still think we should get some sort of update from most of these witnesses at some point and without pointing out to anybody in particular, there are plenty of witnesses that don't really have any front facing updates or notices of any kind.
So that's definitely something I've been a proponent of for a long time is.Even if a witness isn't a communicator and it's not their natural thing to be putting out updates on a weekly or even monthly basis, I think coming to these town halls or doing a space at some point or a post, no matter how brief, I think just some level of update should be kind of some kind of requirement of a top 20 witness.
@taskmaster4450: I think it's very important. The number one job of a witness, and I even put this in the threadtest, we're the only ones really who use that name. Most call them block producers, node producers, block validators, something like that.
The most important thing witnesses do is keep this blockchain running. And I've heard people say, well, they should post once a week about what's going on, or I don't think it's too much expect or once a month. What are you gonna post? The node didn't break down, we kept processing blocks? That's what they're supposed to do.
What Khal said is true, a lot of the witnesses are technical people. They're not blog posters, they're not people who write articles. They're technical people and obviously, there's a huge technical component to this. So where is that line? Maybe it's just leftover residual from the old days.
There is a problem because we see people, we see nodes from people who aren't even on Hive anymore. They are no longer here. They haven't even been here since we forked three years ago, yet they still have 20 million or 30 million votes or whatever in terms of Hive power.
So this comes back to each of us consistently looking at the witnesses we're voting for. Who are you voting for? Are they people who are around? And as Khal says, I will echo that. Just because somebody's not posting every day doesn't mean that they're not doing anything. Doesn't mean that their node's not operating. Doesn't mean that they're not performing, uh, services for the blockchain because a lot of times what these people do. It's not evident. It's not out there. They're constantly going through, uh, high blocks. They're constantly pulling stuff and data from the blockchain and looking at it and working on problems, working on codes. You get onto the, you listen to the, the dev call that Howo posts, uh, you know, every couple of weeks or once a month, however often they have them.
And suddenly you start seeing names there like Gandalf, who's not necessarily around, but You know, he's working on base layer coding. So these are things that, again, it goes back to conversation, what we're talking about, what we're, we're opening up avenues where if somebody isn't going to write a 1500 word post, that's not their thing fine they could come on to something like this, you know, and if you are looking to give your witness votes to people and you prefer to be giving it to people you know are doing something, then maybe look for those people who are on these spaces, who are around, who show up on the developer calls, you know, who are on threads, who are commenting, who, who do different things.
I mean, Arcange is a prime example. There's somebody who's a developer, but he was on this call. He was on the spaces with me after one of the HiveFest days. He presented at HiveFest. You know, there's somebody who does a lot for the blockchain, but it may not be known to everybody, but at least people on this call are starting to see them around.
And if that's what you feel is a, a variable for you to place a a witness vote, then fine. Look for those people.
@moderator: And this also resonates with the idea that @town-hall has, of course, the idea of having a team witness, is kind of new for Hive. We don't believe it's the only way to do it. Of course, there can be individual witnesses.
There can be team witnesses. There can be that witnesses. But in our case, we decided, okay, we have, we need to have a tech side. We need to have a business side. We need to have an economic side. We need to have a social side. And that's how this witness came to be. The fact that, okay, maybe the developer cannot make the posts, but we have another person that can make the posts.
@khaleelkazi: I was just gonna say, um, I forget who made the point, but, uh, you know, a few points back, um, you know, it's, or I guess it was Tafs talking about, you know, producing blocks is the number one responsibility of witnesses, um, and I definitely agree with that, you know, I mean, You have to run your node. You have to produce the blocks.
You know, that's kind of why you're there is to secure the blockchain. But, you know, I think a big misconception is that running a node and producing blocks is actually a very kind of passive activity. There's, you know, Very little technical, technical aspect to it and maintenance in terms of things that you actually have to do, you might have to do something once a month.
I do agree that, you know, your main function as a witness is to produce blocks, but I, I also think that if. You're a witness and the only thing you're doing is producing blocks, uh, that's kind of, uh, it's kind of a misallocation of a witness, in my opinion, and that might be a hot take for some people, but, um, I think in order to be a top 20 or top 30 or whatever, you know, you should be doing a lot more than just producing blocks, and I really like what, what you said earlier, Eric, that a key function of a witness is to, you know, one, be the voice of the people and to be a representative Both on, you know, internally to Hive and externally to the outside world.
@moderator: Yes, and I do think that there is a lot of witnesses that, okay, yes, I produce the blocks, but I also, I don't know, run a curation system. Or I run the blocks, but I also develop these dApps. Or I run the nodes, but I also do this and that. So I think those are the witnesses that provide the most value to the blockchain.
But that being said, we also need, the more witnesses we have, even if they just run blocks, they add value to the blockchain. But yes, as, as Khal says, and I do agree, the bar is very high. Right now for, for the top 20 in the sense of "if you want to be on the top, you have not only to, to have a node or to produce blocks, but you also have to add more value to the community the way that you want it to be, but there has to be an added value".
@l337m45732: I just wanted to ask something first. Uh, I wanted to listen to what Tasmata was saying. And it is that sometimes we don't see some witnesses posting at a day or anything about it related to that because many things that a witness do is produce blocks.
You can see it inside of the blockchain. Some people don't know about it. There is a tool that I think Khal and Leoteam built is called High, hivestats. And people could do, could go there, just put the name of the witness and the, the username and you will see how many blocks they have produced, how much HP there are getting from that. Many other stuff that you can see there. And that's something that in my case, I didn't want to do a post about it because people should go there and see, and there is tons of other tools that you can use for that too. Uh, in my experience, what I did was, just read a post about how you can set a witness though, without much problems nowadays.
And I think that was something that could bring some utility to people that don't know about how. I don't know how to do that. Um, that was the thing that I do mostly because hivecuba is not a witness that you could, that is Only, uh, producing blocks. There is also a community that is, has a, a curating system that is also is bringing some thoughts about high in Cuba, marketing high inside Cuba, and bringing some more, things to it that, that are outside of the blockchain.
So no, there is no many, uh, I don't know. Uh, we don't usually talk about our own chain, but, uh, There are many things that we do all shame, that sometimes people don't know about that it's there. You can look at it, that we have a, a web to source for that, that sometimes we don't have the time to, to more people on chain about it, but it's there.
So sometimes we, we just, we just need to look a little deep then. Just the, the witness is stable for that. Um, producing block, uh, that was the, the question they see. What is a block?
@crimsonclad: So, blocks, one of the easiest ways to think about this, and I often explain them in really sort of easy to understand terms.
Blocks are like big groups of transactions. Think about everything that happens on Hive every few seconds. You've got votes, you've got comments, you've got posts, you've got JSONs. All of the things that happen on Hive, when you broadcast them, they need to be checked if they follow Hive's rules. So a block is basically when a witness node, a server, if you want to call it that, and I'll explain nodes in a second, a block is a big group of transactions that a witness node checks to make sure they follow Hive's rules.
That's the easiest way to think about it. Think of a block as a box full of transactions. The witness's job, when it gets handed a block, when it's their turn in shuffle, they get a block, they will quickly check all the transactions inside that block to make sure that they follow the rules of Hive. If they do, the block goes into the chain and is quickly checked over by the rest of Consensus.
Consensus matches, boom, the block is in the chain.
So when you think about a blockchain, and all of the blocks that are lined up in a row, they are big boxes full of valid transactions. And the way that they're ordered in the chain is, here's the order in time that they happened. And each witness goes down, And is producing these blocks, is checking these transactions, and they're all working together to put these blocks full of transactions in a line.
And then they share that information with all of the other nodes. So that's the easiest, easiest way to understand what a block is. It's very simplified, but in terms of when you understand what happens when you click on a transaction and send it out into space, that's what's happening in the background with your block producers.
This is also why it's kind of important to vote for good witnesses, because obviously you want witnesses that are using the rules that everybody agrees on, right? We want to make sure that the rules of Hive are what we think they are. That is why when you vote for a witness and they're running a version of Hive that you want.
It's very important. A hard fork is a decision. Are we going to change these rules or not? And that's why witness voting around hard forks is really important too. But the easiest way to think about it is Every three seconds, there's a new block full of transactions and a witness is going to get it and double check that everything in it looks good and then share that information with the rest of the witnesses.
That's where the blockchain comes from. And then the only other thing is I saw some terminology around node. Node is, I see task answered, it's a server. One of the easiest ways to think about this is basically, you can set up a witness server in a couple of different ways. So nodes are that, that machine running that software that does something.
There are three different ways to handle it. One is a block producer, which is a witness. One is a seed node. Which is something that propagates blocks and gets them ready for witnesses. And one is an RPC node, which is basically the one that goes back and forth between the blockchain and your services, moving information.
So when you ask on a front end, I'd like to make a vote. The RPC node is the thing in the middle that runs back and forth between the blockchain and serves that information to either you or to a front end. And those three things are all basically part of when you're running infrastructure for Hive. How you set up your configuration, you could be any of those things.
Those nodes are all very similar and they're all parts of how the blockchain is produced. And they're all things that witnesses and infrastructure providers run. On behalf of everybody that uses this blockchain.
@moderator: And that is exactly why we, uh, uh, value that Crim is here to, to, to make things easy for everyone to understand because remember the point of this town-hall is to bring the concepts and bring the the intricacies of the blockchain of the high blockchain and make them of easy access and easy understanding for everyone on-chain, doesn't matter how, how long have you been here, but, uh, the point is to get everyone involved and, and to understand the important parts of a blockchain.
@l337m45732: I just wanted to add to that. You know, we got, we went a little in depth there. Thank you, Crim, for explaining blocks and nodes. Uh, and I feel like I need to clarify this because those questions came up.
When we talk about transactions, we're not talking about, you know, a buyer, a seller, we're talking about anything you do on Hive. So whether it's a comment, whether it's a post, whether it's a vote, maybe you do make a transaction on the internal market. All of those are transactions that happen on the blockchain.
And the producers make sure those are valid. So... Yeah, it's not just monetary things, transactions are everything that happens on the chain. It all has to be validated.
@moderator: We are about to wrap up if the, if, if someone else wants to add anything to the conversation just raise your hand and I will hand you the mic
@bookerman: We have the benefit of being a truly decentralized platform. And I know, uh, when I went out, uh, representing Woo and Hive, uh, at Rare Evo and, uh, Breathe, that was one thing that. Really blew people away that we were truly a decentralized platform, and that was a huge selling point, uh, for for us, but one of the, you know, the, the, the negatives of that is since there's no company, there's no marketing team, there's there's no one telling people what to do.
And we have to have awesome people like Crimsonclad and Eric and so many others that do these things, do these Twitter spaces, go out to these, these events, uh, and really preach Hive. And you'd be surprised when you go out to these events and how the people come together. Like, at Breathe, uh, for example, having all those people there, uh, the locals in Rare, uh, Rare Evo, having the locals there that came out and helped set things up, talk to people, uh, and did all that, it's really amazing to see a community come together and be like, look what we did, this is who we are, this is what we do.
It was a really beautiful thing and we just need more people to constantly step up, uh, and do these thankless jobs. Um, and, and, uh, I really appreciate Eric, you holding these spaces, crim, everything you do, guilty parties, uh, all the people with the value plan. Uh, again, it's, it's really amazing to see, and this is a huge asset, a huge benefit of this chain.
And that's all, that's all I wanted to end on.
@taskmaster4450: I personally think this was a great, uh, introductory, uh, town hall. We plan on having them once a month.
We may have to negotiate the day as crim said, because. Uh, there is a conflict with the Core Dev meeting, so maybe we have to move it to another Monday or another day of the week. Also, just to give a reminder, I started hosting on Friday, and I'm going to do it every week. Hopefully every Friday at 1 o'clock Eastern Time, a space is called This Week in Hive.
So if you enjoyed this, uh, it will be a similar format where I'll come on, I may have some base. Topics of what I've seen across high, but people can join. They can talk about whatever projects they're involved in, whatever projects they're utilizing, whatever they know about, whatever questions they have.
It's education. It's for information. And it's just another way to put us on spaces to put us on X that maybe somebody will come along and learn something about Hive and join the blockchain, um, and take a look at what we have to offer. So, uh, if there's nothing else, I think we should close this up.
@l337m45732: Last thing I wanted to say thank you to everyone that came on Thank you for those of you that grabbed the mic and jumped in.
See you in November 1st for the next Hive Community Town Hall Meeting.
Oh, and @uyobong just suggested that we actually draw like a timetable or a calendar. Um, this might be something that's really awesome. Uh, we have a new account that is started on the blockchain called BuzzParty, which actually is highlighting all of the in person events.
I'm waiting for the Buzz party calendar and all sorts of engagements ahead of the next townhall.
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@taskmaster4450: Thanks. Governance is your influence on the blockchain. It's tied to your HP. So the more HP you have, the more you're vote is worth not only for your, your voting power for duration, but in the governance vote, the two main things are the witnesses and the witnesses are your block validators, your block producers, the system we, we have is a top 20 system plus an alternate that's rotated in that handles the block production.
Everybody outside the top 20 becomes an alternate and then it runs through on a cycle basis. Anybody can put forth a. Proposal to get funding out of the Dow, the decentralized high fund as as crim mentioned, and if you get enough votes there, um, then your project will be funded.
The votes again are tied to the age, the high power people have. This is what makes those decisions. So you can sit there and complain about a particular witness. You can complain about a particular project not getting funded, all that stuff. The bottom line is this is a state based system and the direction and the future of many decisions are based upon the voting of one's stake.
If witnesses are doing something you don't like if you increase your stake and you start voting for other witnesses, there can be adjustments over the years. We've seen changes in the top 20 witnesses. Doesn't happen often, doesn't happen all the time, but it does take place.
Ultimately it comes down to, do you want to have any say? In what takes place out here around here, and you can vote one high power and you have an impact. Obviously, if you have 200 high power over one high power, you have greater impact 2000 over 200 same thing. So, collectively, that's where communities that's where groups, they have to look at the high power they have and say, are we being represented and a lot of this starts with the education process as we've mentioned a couple of times here in this inaugural town hall is making people aware and going back to one thing that was asked before.
I think a lot of it Eric goes to promotion. On chain, we have the ability through the social media avenues that we have with Hive to talk about this stuff, we can drop it in threads, people can write articles about it. We can put posts together and discuss this in comment sections of these articles, at least to help with the awareness. And if somebody does post an article about something with governance, others can share it around so maybe new people see it.
@arcange: I would like to add something about governance and witnesses. Something really important. Uh, to know about the role of the top witnesses on top off signing blocks is to secure the blockchain. And this is especially important when it comes to hard forks because the top witnesses are the one that will agree or not on new hardforks, meaning new code implemented in the blockchain.
We saw that when Justin Son was making his hostile takeover, his goal was to gain the control, uh, of at least 17 top witnesses in order to be able to change the code of the blockchain. So when you vote for witnesses, especially top witnesses, when you do governance, you are taking care of the existing blockchain, you are taking care of your assets. And that's why when we have a lot of people from the community voting for witnesses, we reduce the risk of having bad actors gaining control over the blockchain.
@moderator: Witnesses are basically our representatives, both to inside and to the outside. They are securing what we have here and without them we could be easily attacked.
@arcange: That's what we saw at first with Justinson, he tried to gain control over the top 20 witnesses but the community was able to fight back and by people from the community voting for witnesses exercising their governance rights, we were able to bring some legit witnesses back into the top 20 witness and we were close to preventing him from performing this attack.
It was only when Justin Son got help from Binance that we saw that we were kind of (removed) up and we decided to fork. So all users as members of the community have a role to perform by using their governance power.
@moderator: The main reason that we decided to start with this topic, the governance topic is because at a base layer, we need more people to get involved. What's the point of being one of the most decentralized blockchains out there if we don't have an active community that gets involved every single day with governance decisions?
@l337m45732: Maybe you don't have to fully understand exactly how governance on the blockchain work, that's totally fine. We know you drive a car and you don't know how the engine works, maybe you do, but most people don't.
But we're driving this hive engine (hehe) and we don't have to fully understand how it works to be involved. That's my point. You know, we can all be involved, we can all vote, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist to get involved.
You cast your witness votes, maybe you update them regularly, it all goes back to the the education aspect of it.
@moderator: Right now we have a very, very mature community, even though Hive is a young chain, so to speak, our community is almost eight years old. So there are people who already have a name here who already have a reputation.
There are new projects. There are new communities. There are communities who have been around for five, six years. We are a very diverse community.
** @khaleelkazi:** I was just gonna, uh, play off of Nifty's point that, you know, not a lot of people drive a car, but they don't know, you know, how the engine works.
If you overlay that to Hive governance voting, a big thing about governance is that you also can set, um, proxy votes. And I think that's, That's kind of a big thing that a lot of people miss, which is that if you build, you know, there's a lot of people that are active on hive and you know of them. A lot of people know crim, a lot of people know our arcange, acidyo, or taskmaster.
And if you trust their judgment. You actually can proxy vote to them, which is kind of like the half measure to getting involved in governance, which is why Nifty's point kind of reminded me of it, where if you say, okay, I'm a Hive user, but maybe I'm not active, on a daily basis, and I'm not going to keep up with the top 20 witnesses and what they're doing for the blockchain, but I know Taskmaster and I trust him, so I'm going to set him as my proxy vote. And I think it's worthwhile to kind of educate people about that point also.
@moderator: It doesn't matter how involved you are. As long as you get active, either by casting your votes on the witness list or on the DHF proposals, you can do so, or you can just set someone to be your voice.
And I see Manu, uh, with the hand up. I also want to prompt you, uh, for, for us for a specific topic, Manu. I was mentioning how communities are becoming a force on Hive. Yes, you have the whales, you have the established communities, but you also have the new communities that are starting to make a name for themselves.
And these communities can have at an individual level, they can have a small high power, but together they can have a real impact on what gets done or how the votes go on the blockchain. It doesn't matter if you're a whale, if you don't have a community, or if you don't have, or if you are not part of a community, there is a chance that another community, for example, Hive Cuba, and that's why I actually wanted your opinion on this.
Communities are having much more, much more influence right now. And as time goes by and the members are committed and have a long term vision for Hive, these communities will play a very key role on how governance works, maybe in five years, maybe in 10 years.
Uh, Manu, we cannot hear you. Maybe you want to drop from the spaces and join again. Just ask to speak. And I will pass on the mic. Uh, we have WOO in the house who hasn't spoken yet. Hey man, do you have anything to add to the conversation?
@wrestorgonline: Yeah, actually, I have a few things I'd like to talk about. Uh, Hey guys, uh, thanks for inviting me to the space.
I know some of you guys might, might know about our project wrestling organization online, otherwise known as woo. What we're looking to do is we're looking to leave wrestling a better place than we found it. Uh, and we're able to do that with the hive blockchain.
It's actually been really amazing to see how Hive really pushes their projects, and I want to speak about, we've been talking about governance and voting.
What about voting on the value plan proposal that has just been released a few days ago? That value plan is incredibly important to the growth of Hive. It allowed us, as wrestling organization online to go to the rare Evo convention in Denver, have a presence there where we can make connections, have our wrestlers meet other people, and you'd be surprised how many people in the crypto community know who our wrestlers are and are excited to meet them.
We were also able to go to the breathe convention in Vegas. And what we did at the Breathe convention in Vegas brings, brings tears to my eyes because it leaves my heart so full again, our mission is leaving wrestling better than we found it.
One of our partner wrestlers, Perry Saturn has found himself in a really hard place. Uh, he hasn't been out, uh, to, to see the wrestling community for about 20 years now. Hasn't been on TV for about 20 years. Hasn't seen a lot of those wrestlers and the comrades that he has, uh, and the people that care about him.
And we brought him to, to Vegas and reconnected him with some of his friends like, uh, Sonny Ono and, um, and Disco Inferno. And seeing the smile on Perry's face when he was back around people that cared about him, I literally was in the Uber ride on the way home. Saturn and sunny up front and and tears were in my eyes because my heart was so full I felt so good and that is something that is directly a result of hive It is a direct result of the community the vast hive community coming together and making this work for us Uh and and in changing people's lives We were able to save perry saturn's house for being taken from him. That is real change that is real positive change and we're able to do that with the community and with governance, uh, with people voting on proposals and that's why we are a witness.
I believe we're in the top 60 ish, maybe 62 or something like that as a witness. And we've been around for just over a year but we want to give back to the community. We all grow in this together. We're all in the same boat together. Let's rise together. Uh, and so having these Twitter spaces is huge to get the information out there to the regular people.
It's also huge to get us together to speak to each other. And if you see some of these accounts and some of these projects that you aren't following, go follow them, you know, share this space out on your Twitter, share it out with your community, get the word out there and, and let's grow this baby. Woo.
@crimsonclad: So forget the value plan stuff for a second. Although, you know, honestly, Booker bringing that up is a great point. One of the things that I think is so awesome and getting to watch this as we go and speaking specifically to that idea of communities becoming an incredibly important part of governance voting.
I think Manu's example of like Hive Cuba becoming essentially like a really important voting block along with our other communities. Here's Wu as an example as well. When you think of the type of people who end up in the blockchain space, disruptive tech, you probably don't immediately think of wrestling fans and that's not a slight, t's just what a different. Style of, you know, approaching entertainment, right?
You're watching athletes, you're out in physical arenas. What you're interested in doesn't necessarily immediately correlate with, you know, a nerdy disruptive tech kind of blockchain stack. And yet here is Hive building a crossover where games and social feedback loops exist, where communities end up pulling together because you can share whatever the heck you want on the blockchain and the more that we kind of create these fun places for people to gather that are more equitable like forums or front ends or What have you social spaces where people gather around a common interest? They become a community that potentially has a completely Different set of values and it's one of the reasons that hive is so poised to have such a strong, such a strong governance mechanism.
And it's not just the tech side of things. It's because specifically this blockchain builds a really incredibly varied and distributed user base. Every vote you make, forget about governance, even on witnesses and DHF, every vote you make every day is distributing hive to different people around the world and actually decentralizing this block chain further.
So when you start bringing in groups that come together around. Uh, a different set of interests is something like wrestling. You are suddenly opening up this space that we're saying we want to see diversified every day, distributed every day. You're opening it up to a group of people you wouldn't have been able to reach in any other way, which is the coolest part about our DAPs and our different groups, whether they're cultural, whether they're interest based, whether they're service based, however it is that these communities with different approaches, different interests, different people, however they come to the blockchain they have this social feedback loop where they can talk where they can gather and where yeah they can actually kind of decide here's what we want to see let's all vote for it and so for me WOO is a great example of people who would have never never never found our blockchain space who now find someone that either they've watched in the past that have ties to their childhood that compete in a sport that they're interested in, or they get drawn in buying, you know, the magical cardboards, the trading card game, and they love that aspect of it. And I really am excited to see how each of these communities brings people that we would not have had otherwise, it's crowdsourcing and crowdfunding knowledge in a way, which I think is huge for balanced governance.
@moderator: Exactly. And just like crims says, forget about all of the rewards from posts and, and, and from, from comments and all of that, every vote you cast as an individual is telling or is signaling, Hey, I want you to have a bigger say on the governance, I want you to have more hype tokens so that whatever you stand for. You have a bigger influence, so the more that we spread hive as a token with the community, the more that we have to into account what is the hive that is being spread used for.
So if you align with someone, even if they post, you could say low quality stuff. If they align with what what you think is best for the blockchain, that is also value. So the best part of this decentralized space is that anyone can do whatever they want with their vote.
@manu.photos: Thank you first for inviting me. I wasn't sure I would be here because of my work and now I'm on the street.
So if you hear any sound, uh, sorry. Sorry for that. I'm in Cuba and in a a bit loud place. Um, I wanted to talk about how Cuba and in a way, how it has empowered many Cubans in many different ways because we are not just a trading card game or a focused community on any topic. We are just a community for everyone in the country that are welcome to play a game or create content or vote for the content or anything that they do.
I wanted to speak about the previous topic that it was about witnesses and boarding. Um, there's something that we need to do with this uses that sometimes they don't know about, what a witness is or how they can hit with their votes to maintain the And I think we need to approach that from every single community that we have.
Because Hive, we need to remember that Hive is a big community, but it is a big community made from many communities. So, not everyone can know what a witness is, but we can, he can know about it from another friend that is doing the same.
I know they are both playing a game, or they are both in a community that is about content, about Cuba or that's just, I don't know, posting pictures on Hive. People should tell them about in any way. Maybe we can do a mechanism for marketing for inside marketing or Hive. We should think about and how to approach that, I wanted to say I don't have much time, but I Also wanted to say that we have a something that's really good for this And it's our reputation system that is based on every Single thing that we do, every single interaction transaction that we do on our blockchain and it's something that sometimes people forget.
People forget to see that number when someone is commenting or reaching them and people need to know more about that because that's the way we can know that we are talking to someone that is, uh, actually not a bot. There is a real person that has... Some value or has bring some value to, uh, to the blockchain, to the community or wherever he's, he's at in any places or, uh, so somehow tell more about, uh, our communities there, uh, tell a little more about this because people need to know how this works and how they can use it to be more safe in our space and for that to know how people are using our blockchain, how they're contributing, how a witness has become a witness in the top 20 or is doing it because he just wants to help the blockchain.
And that's how Hivecuba has become a witness. Because we just have the enough amount to our curation project, just, uh, have a server and be a witness. No matter how many votes that we get on our witness, we will be, uh, we will always keep our witness servers on. Because just, just because we can, because we wanted to help our blockchain. So, uh, no... I don't know if many witnesses do it, uh, that way, because that was our way to contribute the, the trust that the blockchain has provided us.
@moderator: Exactly. And just like Manu says, it's all about getting the small user, the little guy to get involved. It doesn't matter how much Hive you have. Getting involved and having as many witnesses as possible. It doesn't matter how far or how close you are from, from the top 20.
The more witnesses we have means that at least at one point they will run a block, and that means the blockchain is getting more decentralized. At one point we used to have around 120 active witnesses. Right now I don't have the number, but I see the top 100 have a lot of inactive witnesses. If you are voting for any inactive witness or anyone who hasn't updated their feed or, or done anything related to, to being active in the, in the blockchain governance, you should change all of your votes.
Crim, I know you have to leave very soon. So I have a question for you that, that I think the community will be glad to hear.
Right now it seems like we are playing the governance game, but also Anyone who has something to add to the conversation that might not be positive or might someone in a bad light It seems like people are doubting into doing it or not because of course we are a transparent blockchain everyone can know who said what and there might be some fear of retaliation or thinking that you're a toxic person or that you're a problematic person.
How how can we encourage people to be more vocal no matter how much state they have without thinking there's going to be consequences.
@crimsonclad: Yeah, that's a doozy. Um, yeah, I think we're doing okay. We're doing okay for time because there's normally first Monday of the month is the core dev meeting where we kind of get as many of our core developers and really technical people together to do a live stream meeting for that.
But we we did cancel it today because a bunch of us are here. So yeah, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to talk about timing. But, um, you know, that's a doozy of a question, and it's one of those things where going back to our very first town halls very, very early six years ago or whatever, um, I have this thing that I haven't been able to do for a long time, and it's, it's, I clap for emphasis, and I'll tell you the easiest way to handle this when you need to speak your mind.
Kindness costs nothing.
You can say whatever you want, and we encourage you to do that here. Just think about how you frame it. It's as simple as that. You know, I think Hivefest and in person gatherings are the most perfect example. I can think of people who on chain, I really don't get along with, or I don't agree with, and I don't like.
And we've never really had a bad run in. But these are people who, you know, if you asked me, uh, no thank you, that's fine, I'll pass. Then, you meet them in person and you realize, nope, you are reading what's on chain with your own personal bias. And this is something that is so difficult for humans, this is not a hive thing, this is not a blockchain thing. This is a human thing. And one of the things I like to say about Hive a lot is it's a human blockchain. It's human tech built by humans for humans, and then we human all over it. So, you know, there are some very real concerns about, oh, no, somebody is going to be really mad at me if I say something or somebody is going to downvote me.
And one of the hardest shifts to make in our space is thinking about the way that you read and the way that you write, in that we do still On-chain, commit things to text and it can be a little tricky because you're really always going to have an opinion in your head and when you read somebody else's words, you're going to kind of overlay that opinion on it.
And so often you'll find a lot of the exchanges that feel like they're getting heated or things that kind of spiral when they shouldn't are because people are projecting that worry onto the conversation. So my best advice to you to start is simply always just assume the other person isn't trying to personally hurt your feelings.
Um, and that's a really hard thing. All, all of life, that's good advice. And it's hard to do. I'm bad at it also. I will say, you're going to have some opinions that people don't like. You are going to have beef with other people. That is inevitable in a space where humans gather and especially in a space where humans are trying to come to consensus on anything, whether it's technological or not.
When you add Distribution and rewards to the sort of mix. It gets a little messier yet. So there's, there's two things that I can say to you. And the first one I have, which is, you know, do your very best to just assume that somebody is not coming for you. They will probably really make it clear if they are.
And I know because I get a lot of those messages. But the other thing is, remember that this blockchain doesn't force you to be nice people are always worried about down votes, and I think I think that's fair But only to a degree, because at the end of the day, as much as it does hurt, and, and everybody goes, Oh, well you're a big account, so downvotes don't hurt you.
But as much as it does hurt to think there is a positive visual form of feedback to you that was not, you know, not encouraging. A downvote, a flag, looks and feels bad. It feels bad to us as people. But it also... It doesn't stop you in any way, and in most cases, most cases, downvotes are often one offs because somebody doesn't agree with your saying, and they are not huge.
The second that you sort of kind of brace yourself and get over the fact that you're going to get a downvote at some point on this chain, you kind of gain a superpower. And you start realizing that it's okay, because no one can stop me from saying this opinion. And it gives you a chance to kind of reflect, how, how important is this opinion to me?
And, you know, if I'm worried about getting downvoted for it, should I be talking to other people? Should I find more people who also hold this opinion? You know, am I so far out to lunch? Is this something that we just, not enough people right now are thinking about? So, I'm not suggesting that you all go out and yell at each other and get, you know, downvoted into oblivion.
But there's two ways to take it. You can only control yourself, which means how you speak to other people and how you frame your arguments, but also how you read what other people are saying. Everyone here is passionate about this blockchain and about some topic, which gets them a little riled up. Um, but the biggest thing that I kind of want to help people dispel is, there's a chance you're going to get a downvote out there.
I don't think that it's worth it, in most cases, to silence yourself based on that. And, you know, the flip side is, is everybody goes, well, a whale will rocket me into the ground and destroy me. Take a look around the chain. And take a look around sort of how many accounts that's actually happened to and then look at sort of the conversation that's happening that's led them there and you'll see.
Usually the few places that this does happen, it's because people are incredibly heated, incredibly, um, there are interactions that in the real world, if we're happening face to face, would be incredibly problematic, and even then, you are still able to go read those conversations because are not removed from the blockchain.
Their opinions are not removed, but you can come to that consensus as a group of do I want this around me or not? Um, so I mean, this will never be an easy topic. There's no way around it, but I think in a lot of cases we do so much internal worrying and internal projecting of our fears and our concerns and our insecurities that this is another space for communities to kind of come together.
You know, if you're a little worried about your opinion or you're really Scared of seeing something one of the best things that you can do in real life and on the blockchain is Asking your friends and a few people in the wider community that you, you know, you touch upon because it turns out the more that you speak to other people, the more you're going to understand your own opinion.
And you're either going to build up support behind it, or you may change your mind a little bit. But I think that comes back to what's really good about the social feedback on Hive and where communities are going to come into play for people to feel more comfortable expressing their opinions.
@moderator: And I do think that the key takeaway, I mean, not that everything that you said wasn't important, but the key takeaway here is that 90 percent of the replies or the response that you will get depends on how you frame it and how you proceed in talking about the topic.
@crimsonclad: It's a skill. It's a skill that you always got to work on. It's, uh, that's not a hive thing specifically.
@moderator: Yes. Thanks, Karim, for that take. Um, I do want to get back to the communities, uh, side of things and how. How that's one of the main foundations that we we've had for seven years, but that it's going to take a bigger role in the future, and Khal, I know that you are a big proponent. Of, of communities as a, as an influence, um, core and how they can change how Hive works. Do you want to add to that conversation?
@khaleelkazi: Yeah, I think, um, you know, kind of echoing on, on what Crim said, if you have conversations with people, it really can change your perspective.
I saw that firsthand when I went to Hive Fest last week, um, and met a lot of you guys for the first time. Um, so when you look at that from the community layer, getting involved in the community is, is really what changed my perspective on this blockchain and got me more involved in the legacy chain, uh, and everything we used to do there.
I found different little pockets of, of people that kind of talked about the same thing and obviously back then we were kind of. Conform to just long form, you know, writing blog posts and commenting on each other's blog posts, but even back then there were creative ways to kind of get involved with each other.
You know, we would ping each other on each other's comment sections and stuff like that. But nowadays we have these like really powerful community features. Whether you look at, you know, peakD's UI or ecency or Leo's UI, there's tons of ways to see the different communities and, and join them and create content in them and overall put your name out there.
I think that's a huge way to. Also lead into governance, because, you know, when you start building out your network and you get familiar with different people, you start to kind of not necessarily just adopt their views, but actually just think about their views and, you know, learn from them and see what they have to say about different witnesses, um, see what they have to say about different proposals.
I think the community, the hive mind or the, the brain power behind the community, uh, is a really important thing to tap into, and I think communities themselves, you know, the, the individualized communities are a great way to kind of organize people around different ideas, uh, and, and then drive those into government governance decisions.
@moderator:Right on. And for those who are, who are listening and you want to chip in the conversation, just ask to speak. This is not a closed space. Anyone can speak. The town hall is supposed to be where anyone, no matter who you are, you can just have your takes if you don't feel comfortable with voice remember we have a thread cast where you can just add whatever.
And we, we will start reading them. There's 420 comments already, but we will go through them. Uh, Leo finance will, we'll vote some of it will curate some of the good ones. Uh, probably some of the. Of the, of the speakers will do as well. I was going to say taskmaster is pretty, pretty silent. Uh, he's got us very used to having a lot of takes on things, but nifty, do you want to come in?
@l337m45732: Yeah, I just wanted to say, you know, if you, if you have something to say, even if you don't like, you know, if you're not tech savvy or don't quite know how things work, speak up. You know, we're all, we're all part of the same family here. We're all headed towards the same direction. We all want the best for this ecosystem.
And it's better for you to not stay silent, speak, you know, uh, put your hand up, ask a question if you don't know how something works, someone in the community does just ask. No one's going to judge you. No one's going to, you know, make you feel uncomfortable if you just want to speak on anything. So, just wanted to put that out there.
@taskmaster4450: One thing I wanted to add about Cal, and I'll get a little bit, uh, futuristic here if I can for a second. Uh, communities are, are important because I believe... This is a precursor in the future to DAOs. We are going to see a lot of the communities that are forming over time will evolve into DAOs as different facets of technology are integrated.
We know that, generative AI is starting to take off. We know there's different things and being centralized with regulators and government agencies isn't a great thing. So, Puts a target on your chest. So there's a variety of reasons and factors feeding into this, but when we start to look at where things can be in five, seven, 10 years, uh, it's going to be a vastly different world technologically, and this is really paving away and to a certain degree, you can make a case and I think it would be a valid case that that hive itself is a DAO and your stake, your governance vote, even though it's human, it does release automated features. It releases, you know, the payouts of the reward pool. It releases, uh, you know, and updates the witness voting to the moment.
It releases funding from the DHF. And we may over time see more of that, whether it be at the base layer or whether it be with these layer two side chains and things that are being created there. You know, eventually we're going to have smart contracts. It could be related to NFTs. I mean, we don't know where all of this is going to go, but that's the direction things are headed in.
And so it's important to get some of these basic fundamental habits, if you will, ingrained in us to look at the DHF, uh, proposals occasionally to look and review your witness votes occasionally to make sure you are staking as much as you can, comfortably. So you are growing your influence on chain, especially if you are building something.
And also as a community. That like Manu was talking about with Hive Cuba as a community or the WOO community or the Leo community or the basket weaving community, the photography community, it doesn't matter what community. That those communities can be represented and it all comes back to that simple premise.
What stake are we collectively voting with and what impact is it going to have? And the final thing I'd say before I'll mute myself again is for those who don't think their vote matters that there isn't a lot, Oh, I don't have much HP.
Well, first off, as we witnessed with the Justin Sun situation.
Even though Justin Sun prevailed in the end, a lot of small token holders united, they voted with the community, and their collective stake did make a difference. So that's the first thing. So do not overlook that. The second thing, Always keep in mind, it's a percentage basis of the total. So if you have 100 HP and you go to 200 HP, you say, well, that's only 100 HP.
But your influence individually just doubled. And if you go from 100 HP to 400 HP, you just 4x your influence. You are not going to see an account, I don't know who the largest account holders, let's say blocktrades, blocktrades is not going to double his stake. I mean, to go from whatever he's at to double, it's not going to happen.
So always keep that in mind. So even if you're at 25 HP. Get yourself to 50 HP, then 100, then 200, then 400. Try to keep working up the scale, because it does have an impact, especially if you start to get into a newer community, like a Hive Cuba or something like that, where all of a sudden, hey, I can make a difference over here.
@bookerman (WOO): I just wanted to kind of kind of add in a little bit what Taskmaster was saying about, uh, increasing hive power, increasing your voting stake. There's many different ways you can increase it. One way that we have, increased our influence on Hive. Is we offered HP delegation rewards.
So if you, uh, delegate your HP to wrestling organization online and we could use that HP to curate our community and, and, and give back rewards to our community, we gave you some woo token. We're still actually offering this. But by doing that, we've increased our hive power to just under 200,000.
I want to say we only hav about 10,000 hive power staked, and there's about 180,000 delegated. And using that proxy votes, there's many different ways that you can increase your influence, increase your distribution, and have a bigger say, and the nice thing is about Hive is I'm not a developer.
I just had a developer meeting, during this Twitter space, too. Uh, but I, half the stuff, I, I don't know what that's all about. I'm, I am a, more of, in a leadership role. I, I come from film and television, uh, and, and film production. So I'm more in working with people to make something, bringing their talents in and creating something cool.
And we've been lucky enough to do that. And we've been able to do that by using tools, uh, that are available, uh, through some of the great developers like yeah, but Matt, even Aggie, and his Hive Engine and, and Tribal Decks, and allowing, uh, new projects to enter the space and not be intimidated.
Because the big thing is, like, when you're, when you're a new project, and you're trying to get into Web 3, and you're not a developer, it's, it's, the door is closed to you in most places. You either need a big hose of money, or you need to be a developer. And Hive was not closed off to us. We were able to build our community, talk about wrestling, talk about our partnered wrestlers, build that up.
We were able to release assets, tokens, NFTs, have a marketplace, all for very, very cheaply. It was, it was so beneficial for us as a, as a startup, uh, to start on Hive. I would tell anyone that was starting a new quality project that actually solved a problem, I would tell them to build on Hive. I would hands down tell them to build on Hive because you can build a community and you can find people that fit in your community from other people's communities.
For example Pizza Guild. I saw them in here earlier today. Uh, having them... Uh, be a part of, of Woo from the beginning was huge. Uh, it allowed us a bunch of users that now know about our project that like wrestling and want to talk about wrestling.
And that expands over the broad Hive community.
And so you can, you can find your niche here. You can build here. You can do it way cheaper than you can do it on other chains. You can find quality developers because we do have many quality developers. Um, there's so many that are here right now. Uh, but there's so many that are just in the back end, just coding away.
Uh, and as you guys were saying earlier, sometimes they don't have the presence because they're not making a bunch of posts, but they're constantly building on hive. That was just my two cents. I really do love hive. I, I am super, uh, uh, pro hive. I think it's the best chain to start a project on hands down.
And the love that you get from the broader community isn't found anywhere else. That's, that's all I had to say.
@moderator: A hundred percent. And I'm going to start reading out loud some of the questions, uh, on the threadcast. If anyone who's a speaker wants to respond to them, just raise your hand. I'm just gonna go with the first one.
@ura-soul (written): You're solely saying it is well known in marketing psychology that the fear of losing something is far more of a significant impactor that it is the excitement of gaining something. Downvoting was originally only for policy of, of relatively extreme content.
@moderator:I like this, this, uh, this take because 1 thing that we didn't mention, but that it's definitely something that can happen if you don't feel comfortable being vocal about something that you don't like about governance, witnesses, DHF, whatever.
You can always talk to your most trusted witness or, or to someone who aligns with your, with, with the way you think. And you can just tell them, Hey, I noticed this. You as a witness, you are a top 40 witness, you're a top 20 witness. Uh, I don't feel comfortable speaking out. Can you do it for me? And that's what witnesses are.
Part of the responsibility of witnesses is being the voice of the small users. So just reach out to one of these witnesses and tell them, Hey, I feel like this. Can you be vocal about it? And then someone will do it for you if you don't feel comfortable.
I see @thelogicaldude is here. Hey man, do you want to add something to the conversation?
@thelogicaldude:** I wanted to real quick piggyback on WOO's comments about building businesses on Hive. It is absolutely the best chain to do so. I've tried to build on different chains, but I keep coming back to Hive and, you know, so, you know, with Hive List and Blocktunes and Hive Hustlers, it just was the best fit, to really get a business going, whether it's just a.
You know branded blog like hive hustlers has turned out to be and you know, like my, you know, e commerce site like hive list, you know, you there's ton of opportunities out there. So, um, yeah, don't limit yourself.
But my biggest thing and kind of goes to that too is, you know getting Engaged in the community is also extremely important and one thing that small users Tend to be a little, a little wary of is trying to get in and actually jump in and engage with these, you know, with these different accounts, you know, a lot of us are actually looking for feedback from the community because, you know, how are we supposed to know what the community wants without?
You know the feedback from the community. So it's important for small users to really engage and get involved And you know put their say out there kind of thing whether you know It's logical or not, you know, it's you know, there's never a dumb question is what I always grew up saying, you know so, um, but yeah, don't be afraid to get engaged and that's you know, and I see things All the time on how to build yourself individually on hive, you know, and my biggest piece of advice to that is to not worry about your own content At 1st.
Get involved in other people's content. Comment does what a lot of people don't realize is comments are essentially posts. So you can not have a very long opinion about something, you know, if it's on one of the short forms and, you know, you may have to expand, um, on a different front end or something, but, uh, yeah, put your, put your voice out there, get involved because you never know who you're going to get, who you're going to meet, who you're going to get yourself involved with and where it's going to eventually take you.
I never thought that three years ago, I'd essentially be living almost full time on crypto. Well, it's happened and here I am, and I've got a huge community of people that, you know, have helped make that happen, you know, so get out there, get involved. Don't be scared. That's what I had to say.
@moderator: 100 percent and engagement is also a way that you can grow your influence on Hive.
There are many, many stakeholders who. I mean, at first glance would be like, Oh, this guy has 10, 000 high power. This guy has 20, 000 high power. Yes. But his follower base is huge because they engage with other people. They comment, they get involved with the community and their influence within governance is bigger than what their wallet says.
@thelogicaldude: Yeah, you can't always go by what your wallet says because like I said, people like me, we actually live on this stuff. I'm in the middle of a power down now to pay for a cross country move. I'm moving from one side of the US to the other, actually leaving in a couple of hours.
And so, yeah, you can't always go by what's in the wallet. You just, reputation's a good one to kind of go by here, you know, there's some flaws and that. Um, You know, in the reputation numbers and that kind of thing, but it's just what the person is contributing to the blockchain. You can look at all that on chain, like criminal saying earlier, you can verify, you can see what these people are about by what they're posting on chain.
So go by that versus just a wallet amount.
@hugomarcel (written): Everyone on Hive needs to be on this space. I have learned more about the Hive ecosystem on spaces than I have on the blog side of things. People need to know what governance and witnesses are.
@moderator: So how, like, as a big community leader, how can we make these spaces, uh, get more reach?
I mean, we just talked about the planning. We are going to announce this for the next month, uh, with more, with more, with more advanced and pick a time that is better for everyone. But how, how can we, or how can the community get involved in, in pushing this? Uh, far and wide, so that more people attend and more people learn.
We're going to change topics every month. We're going to have dab, uh, guests. We're going to have witnesses that, uh, as guests. So, what's up?
@crimsonclad: So, you're the Twitter expert, my man. Uh, X X expert? That's a terrible portmanteau. Um, to be quite honest, this answer is not a slam. Um, but what I will say is that, uh, the best way to learn is to try and teach if you have the joy for it.
Um, and so We have a lot of people who actually do these types of events, and so the best kind of way to do this is, you know, take a crack at it, come to the ones that you have a chance to come to, obviously, share them around, but realistically, encourage people in your own groups and spaces to build them, and you know, I mean, here we've got Task is here and, you know, John is part of your, um, witness initiative as well.
I mean, there's CTT, which is, you know, the three speak guys doing community token talk, you know, you've got the Crypto Maniacs podcast, you've got, I mean, Even up until this, this last year, um, I was doing every week on Saturday, I was doing a, um, Disruptive Tech podcast called Cyber Buzz and people would come and we would do exactly this.
And so, you know, one of the things that I think is really effective and, you know, do as I say, not as I do, because unfortunately, I got sent so many places for Hive this year that my, my own podcast kind of got pushed to the side. Um, so even when I do resume them. One of the best things you can do is as you're teaching, as you're talking, um, talking about these other spaces as well.
Um, because there is, there's, there's a form of receptiveness and responsiveness that we have when we can hear or see each other that will always be different than text. And part of it is that contextual reading. Um, but a lot of it comes down to word of mouth. How do you find out about things in the public square?
In the real world, and you guys can't see me making air quotes right now, you know, the real world, you talk about it, you talk about what you watched on TV to your friends, you talk about the podcast you listen to on the bus, um, word of mouth is so important, and so one of the best things that I would love to see is the more of these So one of the biggest initiatives that we have, whether that is, you know, the existing spaces, the existing podcasts, the existing streams on chain, is that everybody starts shouting out everybody else in that way, because you do, you remember it a little bit differently when you hear it.
Oh, and @uyobong just suggested that we actually draw like a timetable or a calendar. Um, this might be something that's really awesome. Uh, we have a new account that is started on the blockchain called BuzzParty, which actually is highlighting all of the in person events.
Maybe we can reach out and we can create on some of the front ends a calendar for things like all of these podcasts, x spaces, etcetera, that allows people to kind of jump into wherever somebody's teaching or talking, that fits their schedule. Because certainly, I mean, I'm going to be bringing back my shows on Sunday as well, because people have been, people have been really asking to do that.
And so I think. There's no upper limit on how many of these kinds of events we have. And they will grow quickly if you say, Okay, listen, we had a lot of fun in this x space. If you like this and you like half these people, well, it turns out tomorrow they're going to be over here doing it on this space.
And, uh, and you'll see that that kind of thing, that gains momentum so quickly. It's too easy to miss a text or, you know, something that just flew by in your notifications without you hearing it and having sort of the impetus and understanding the people that will be behind it.
@taksmaster4450: If I can add just 1 thing, what crim said, and not only does it apply to what she's saying, but I think this goes to the. Entire how do we market hive? Or how do we attract people to hide? Nothing attracts people more than success and promoting our successes and whether it's a spaces or whether it's a threadcast or whether it's a show like CTT, Cryptomaniacs, cryptoholics, whatever.
If we start talking about the success and saying, Hey, in the last month's spaces, uh, for the town hall, we had 200 people that lets people know there's something there, their success, and that's how we start building momentum.
I mean, it's one thing to promote stuff, and that's not a bad way to go, but nothing sells like success.
@moderator: And just like crim says, as long as we, well, the moment that we gain momentum, this is going to happen very, very fast. Uh, right now we have a hive Zealy community. Uh, that that is mostly focused on this on rallying the hive community from within the blockchain into web two and into trying to outreach more people and to make people notice hive.
Um, and that's, that's just exactly how, how this, this whole idea of the town hall came to be, we need to be vocal. We need to spread Hive. We need to tell people that Hive exists, um, and for those who are listening right now, if you scroll a little bit under the speakers, you will see that we have the, I don't want to say official because I don't even know if, if, if, if the word applies, but we have the community representative X account, you will see it as Hiveblocks, just click on that and follow if you are not following, Uh, and just be on the lookout because this is the account where the hive community puts out, uh, all of the important announcements and all of the things to be aware of.
So if you haven't followed them, go do it now, please. If you are very kind, I'm just searching on the threadcast for more, for more, um, for more comments.
@princessbusayo: Don't laugh at me, please. When I first joined Hive and saw Arcange asking to be voted as a witness, I thought he was a scammer, but now that I have seen, now that I've learned about it, and now that I know more about Hive, I know who he is.
@moderator: The point here is people don't know what witnesses are and what, what are, what is the purpose of witnesses. So, um, yes, I don't know if someone else wants to add anything to the conversation here. I'm just going to go on a rant reading comments from the audience. But if someone else wants to add something, now's the time.
I'm going to put you on the spot, Nifty, and say that you want to say something.
@l337m45732:** Yeah, I, I just unmuted anyway, so I beat you to it. Um, in a, in a non, uh, hard to understand way, the witnesses are our community representatives. They're, they're the people that are voted in by everyone that has a stake on Hive, that has any amount of Hive power.
Anyone can vote even if you only have one Hive power. So the witnesses are the voice of, of community and they're the ones looking out for the best interest of the blockchain. And keeping it running. So if you don't vote for witnesses do yourself a favor,, you can do it from peak D you can go to, uh, you know, your witness votes that I can't think of exactly how to get there at the moment.
Um, but yeah, you can go to your witness votes and, and you can take a scroll through and see if you recognize any of those names there. And, you know, if you do go ahead and give them some support. I know hive Cuba has one. I know Leo finance has one, of course, a town hall-will be live very soon. Um, so yeah, go support the people that are active, go support the people that are speaking on these spaces outward, you know, to, to beyond hive, uh, not, not necessarily the echo chamber.
Um, yeah, so definitely if you don't vote for any witnesses or don't know how to do that, reach out to one of us. Make your vote count.
@thelogicaldude: So just to piggyback on that, and to not forget our second layers too, so some of the, uh, witnesses don't, uh, some of the people that operate, say, you know, side... Uh, like myself, uh, we don't necessarily have a full hive witness, but we may actually support the second layer.
So check that out too. Not to complicate things any further, but Hive Engine does also have a witness structure as well. You have to have the workerbee token to vote for that. Uh, and that also earns you some of their B token too. So definitely make sure to do not forget the Hive Engine witnesses because we are also working really hard to secure the second layer.
@moderator: Yeah, I cannot echo this more. Uh, yes, the high governance is important, but as we grow and as we evolve, there's going to be a lot of layer twos and a lot of dApps that will need the involvement of, of the token holders. So just like the logical dude says, you not only need to vote on the layer one, there are also a lot of layer two, uh, places where, where, where we need to be decentralized.
@brando28 (written):Question about supporting multiple witnesses is my vote power divided between them. Are those the same spot or does the same power support each one.
@moderator: to answer that question. If you have 1000 HP and you vote for 30 witnesses, your 1000 Hive power will support all of them with 1k HP.
So you are not dividing it, you are using all of your high power for each of your 30 witness votes.
@bitcoinflood (written): I don't think it's much to ask a witness to post about what they are doing once a month to keep everyone informed as to what they are doing, even if it's as simple as, Securing the chain.
@crimsonclad: I'm gonna just kind of throw in here. Um, I actually agree with you wholeheartedly But I will say from the opposite side of it. Um, how how it can happen that This may not be the case, so some of you guys may know, some of you may not, uh, from the legacy chain forwards, I was a consensus block producer for more than five years, uh, so basically right through the split and right up till recently, I was one of the top 20 witnesses, um, I will tell you, Boy, oh boy, did I suck at posting.
And in general now, I suck at posting. And it is actually soul crushing, to be quite honest. Um, it's, it's difficult because depending on the role that you take on, Uh, how you are perceived and how your posts do is another weird thing that kind of happens. So I'm just going to throw this out there is nobody's actually really immune to overthinking about things like downvotes and upvotes and this that and the other thing.
Um, but for me personally, uh, I usually work about six hours a day on Hive stuff. Uh, and by the time that I get back to just Should I make a post explaining that today I took some more meetings and did, you know, my software is good? Is that adding to the conversation? No, it's not. Um, you know, and part of that comes back to the expectation that witnesses also be contactable in You know as the flip side and I think and hope that I'm open and accessible to everyone, But I will say as somebody who really really struggled with that balance because of the enormity of work that I take on Um, i'm not sure what the right answer is there But one thing that always played on my mind and that became actually a little bit problematic and probably something that we can talk about.
When I did make a post, it would get So many votes. Too many votes, to be quite honest, for a witness update. It would make way too much rewards. And that became something that, incredibly problematic in that, you know, for some people they felt, well, here's another witness just getting voted on by everyone and making all this money.
And it actually bred a little bit of resentment. Um, and that became something that has played in my mind a lot about how I approach when I communicate on chain. The problem is when you do kind of become a, Um, somebody that's recognized or often that, you know, I guess is liked or whatever. Um, sometimes your posts are over rewarded and that's fine but it, for people who aren't really aware of that relationship, it feels either disheartening or upsetting or in a lot of cases people feel that they're sort of collusion or circle jerking and these are all these sort of really complex topics that don't come to mind until you get deep into Hive and you've spent some time here.
Um, but it's a part that impacts governance that I think about quite a lot, especially on my own behalf. Um, and I don't have a great answer for that. But in terms of, you know, if I've got X amount of time today to spend on Hive tasks, is it gonna be rewriting the same automated post twice a week and just powering along that way, or is it going to be actionable stuff?
And for me, I've chosen actionable stuff, and, and so I think there's probably going to be a lot of feedback where people tell me, well, you've chosen wrong. Um, and I'll be interested to hear that, because now, at current, um, I'm not actually witnessing.
My approach to things has kind of calmed down a bit, because I don't have that same sort of, community requirement, uh, if you want to call it that. So, yeah, I, I'd kind of be interested to hear, is there a time or a place where you think it is okay that witnesses don't give magically, sort of weekly consistent updates or super consistent updates?
Or no, it should happen, and what does that look like?
** @kenechukwu97 (written):** This is the first shot at this town hall meetup. And everything already looks well planned and organized.
@moderator: Oh, believe me, uh, we want this to be more professional and we want this to be more, uh, to have a better flow. Yes, this is the first time that we're doing it. We hope to get better at it.
Going back to the topic that crim is saying, one of the main goals of this town hall would be to have, let's say we have 20 top witnesses and 10 backup witnesses. And for those who don't know, the top 20 are the ones that run most of the chain. Then the backup witnesses are from the 21 to the 30, which run some blocks in between the top 20.
And then you have all the other, uh, witnesses and depending on the, on the rank that they are means how many blocks during a day or during a week they actually process.The point of this town hall would be, so let's say we have 30, uh, with witnesses at the top, maybe bringing five, maybe bringing six every, every three months, every quarter, every six months, whatever, and just have them share.
Hey, I am a witness number seven, my name is Pedro and I'm going and I do this for the chain and then this, this actually takes off that weight from their backs of having to, "Oh, I have to, uh, share with the community what I'm doing or who I am or for the newbies who come and do not know what I do."
Well, maybe you can just come here, every three months and just speak about your witness, what you do, just take 15 minutes and that's it. And the point is to push this Town Hall to everyone, so nobody misses it.
@khallelkazi: I was just gonna echo on, uh, something Crim said, which is, uh, and, and, you know, the general topic, which is, you know, getting More updates from, from the top 20, um, and we kind of talked about it at the beginning too, is, you know, a lot of the top 20 are not active in terms of posting and stuff, you know, in terms of posting and just in general, like communication, but you know, that's not necessarily a bad thing and I don't think that, you know, you should just rule out a witness and say, Oh, they haven't made a post in the last, you know, six months, they must not very active.
A lot of them are active at a more technical or kind of background layer. But that being said, I still think we should get some sort of update from most of these witnesses at some point and without pointing out to anybody in particular, there are plenty of witnesses that don't really have any front facing updates or notices of any kind.
So that's definitely something I've been a proponent of for a long time is.Even if a witness isn't a communicator and it's not their natural thing to be putting out updates on a weekly or even monthly basis, I think coming to these town halls or doing a space at some point or a post, no matter how brief, I think just some level of update should be kind of some kind of requirement of a top 20 witness.
@taskmaster4450: I think it's very important. The number one job of a witness, and I even put this in the threadtest, we're the only ones really who use that name. Most call them block producers, node producers, block validators, something like that.
The most important thing witnesses do is keep this blockchain running. And I've heard people say, well, they should post once a week about what's going on, or I don't think it's too much expect or once a month. What are you gonna post? The node didn't break down, we kept processing blocks? That's what they're supposed to do.
What Khal said is true, a lot of the witnesses are technical people. They're not blog posters, they're not people who write articles. They're technical people and obviously, there's a huge technical component to this. So where is that line? Maybe it's just leftover residual from the old days.
There is a problem because we see people, we see nodes from people who aren't even on Hive anymore. They are no longer here. They haven't even been here since we forked three years ago, yet they still have 20 million or 30 million votes or whatever in terms of Hive power.
So this comes back to each of us consistently looking at the witnesses we're voting for. Who are you voting for? Are they people who are around? And as Khal says, I will echo that. Just because somebody's not posting every day doesn't mean that they're not doing anything. Doesn't mean that their node's not operating. Doesn't mean that they're not performing, uh, services for the blockchain because a lot of times what these people do. It's not evident. It's not out there. They're constantly going through, uh, high blocks. They're constantly pulling stuff and data from the blockchain and looking at it and working on problems, working on codes. You get onto the, you listen to the, the dev call that Howo posts, uh, you know, every couple of weeks or once a month, however often they have them.
And suddenly you start seeing names there like Gandalf, who's not necessarily around, but You know, he's working on base layer coding. So these are things that, again, it goes back to conversation, what we're talking about, what we're, we're opening up avenues where if somebody isn't going to write a 1500 word post, that's not their thing fine they could come on to something like this, you know, and if you are looking to give your witness votes to people and you prefer to be giving it to people you know are doing something, then maybe look for those people who are on these spaces, who are around, who show up on the developer calls, you know, who are on threads, who are commenting, who, who do different things.
I mean, Arcange is a prime example. There's somebody who's a developer, but he was on this call. He was on the spaces with me after one of the HiveFest days. He presented at HiveFest. You know, there's somebody who does a lot for the blockchain, but it may not be known to everybody, but at least people on this call are starting to see them around.
And if that's what you feel is a, a variable for you to place a a witness vote, then fine. Look for those people.
@moderator: And this also resonates with the idea that @town-hall has, of course, the idea of having a team witness, is kind of new for Hive. We don't believe it's the only way to do it. Of course, there can be individual witnesses.
There can be team witnesses. There can be that witnesses. But in our case, we decided, okay, we have, we need to have a tech side. We need to have a business side. We need to have an economic side. We need to have a social side. And that's how this witness came to be. The fact that, okay, maybe the developer cannot make the posts, but we have another person that can make the posts.
@khaleelkazi: I was just gonna say, um, I forget who made the point, but, uh, you know, a few points back, um, you know, it's, or I guess it was Tafs talking about, you know, producing blocks is the number one responsibility of witnesses, um, and I definitely agree with that, you know, I mean, You have to run your node. You have to produce the blocks.
You know, that's kind of why you're there is to secure the blockchain. But, you know, I think a big misconception is that running a node and producing blocks is actually a very kind of passive activity. There's, you know, Very little technical, technical aspect to it and maintenance in terms of things that you actually have to do, you might have to do something once a month.
I do agree that, you know, your main function as a witness is to produce blocks, but I, I also think that if. You're a witness and the only thing you're doing is producing blocks, uh, that's kind of, uh, it's kind of a misallocation of a witness, in my opinion, and that might be a hot take for some people, but, um, I think in order to be a top 20 or top 30 or whatever, you know, you should be doing a lot more than just producing blocks, and I really like what, what you said earlier, Eric, that a key function of a witness is to, you know, one, be the voice of the people and to be a representative Both on, you know, internally to Hive and externally to the outside world.
@moderator: Yes, and I do think that there is a lot of witnesses that, okay, yes, I produce the blocks, but I also, I don't know, run a curation system. Or I run the blocks, but I also develop these dApps. Or I run the nodes, but I also do this and that. So I think those are the witnesses that provide the most value to the blockchain.
But that being said, we also need, the more witnesses we have, even if they just run blocks, they add value to the blockchain. But yes, as, as Khal says, and I do agree, the bar is very high. Right now for, for the top 20 in the sense of "if you want to be on the top, you have not only to, to have a node or to produce blocks, but you also have to add more value to the community the way that you want it to be, but there has to be an added value".
@l337m45732: I just wanted to ask something first. Uh, I wanted to listen to what Tasmata was saying. And it is that sometimes we don't see some witnesses posting at a day or anything about it related to that because many things that a witness do is produce blocks.
You can see it inside of the blockchain. Some people don't know about it. There is a tool that I think Khal and Leoteam built is called High, hivestats. And people could do, could go there, just put the name of the witness and the, the username and you will see how many blocks they have produced, how much HP there are getting from that. Many other stuff that you can see there. And that's something that in my case, I didn't want to do a post about it because people should go there and see, and there is tons of other tools that you can use for that too. Uh, in my experience, what I did was, just read a post about how you can set a witness though, without much problems nowadays.
And I think that was something that could bring some utility to people that don't know about how. I don't know how to do that. Um, that was the thing that I do mostly because hivecuba is not a witness that you could, that is Only, uh, producing blocks. There is also a community that is, has a, a curating system that is also is bringing some thoughts about high in Cuba, marketing high inside Cuba, and bringing some more, things to it that, that are outside of the blockchain.
So no, there is no many, uh, I don't know. Uh, we don't usually talk about our own chain, but, uh, There are many things that we do all shame, that sometimes people don't know about that it's there. You can look at it, that we have a, a web to source for that, that sometimes we don't have the time to, to more people on chain about it, but it's there.
So sometimes we, we just, we just need to look a little deep then. Just the, the witness is stable for that. Um, producing block, uh, that was the, the question they see. What is a block?
@crimsonclad: So, blocks, one of the easiest ways to think about this, and I often explain them in really sort of easy to understand terms.
Blocks are like big groups of transactions. Think about everything that happens on Hive every few seconds. You've got votes, you've got comments, you've got posts, you've got JSONs. All of the things that happen on Hive, when you broadcast them, they need to be checked if they follow Hive's rules. So a block is basically when a witness node, a server, if you want to call it that, and I'll explain nodes in a second, a block is a big group of transactions that a witness node checks to make sure they follow Hive's rules.
That's the easiest way to think about it. Think of a block as a box full of transactions. The witness's job, when it gets handed a block, when it's their turn in shuffle, they get a block, they will quickly check all the transactions inside that block to make sure that they follow the rules of Hive. If they do, the block goes into the chain and is quickly checked over by the rest of Consensus.
Consensus matches, boom, the block is in the chain.
So when you think about a blockchain, and all of the blocks that are lined up in a row, they are big boxes full of valid transactions. And the way that they're ordered in the chain is, here's the order in time that they happened. And each witness goes down, And is producing these blocks, is checking these transactions, and they're all working together to put these blocks full of transactions in a line.
And then they share that information with all of the other nodes. So that's the easiest, easiest way to understand what a block is. It's very simplified, but in terms of when you understand what happens when you click on a transaction and send it out into space, that's what's happening in the background with your block producers.
This is also why it's kind of important to vote for good witnesses, because obviously you want witnesses that are using the rules that everybody agrees on, right? We want to make sure that the rules of Hive are what we think they are. That is why when you vote for a witness and they're running a version of Hive that you want.
It's very important. A hard fork is a decision. Are we going to change these rules or not? And that's why witness voting around hard forks is really important too. But the easiest way to think about it is Every three seconds, there's a new block full of transactions and a witness is going to get it and double check that everything in it looks good and then share that information with the rest of the witnesses.
That's where the blockchain comes from. And then the only other thing is I saw some terminology around node. Node is, I see task answered, it's a server. One of the easiest ways to think about this is basically, you can set up a witness server in a couple of different ways. So nodes are that, that machine running that software that does something.
There are three different ways to handle it. One is a block producer, which is a witness. One is a seed node. Which is something that propagates blocks and gets them ready for witnesses. And one is an RPC node, which is basically the one that goes back and forth between the blockchain and your services, moving information.
So when you ask on a front end, I'd like to make a vote. The RPC node is the thing in the middle that runs back and forth between the blockchain and serves that information to either you or to a front end. And those three things are all basically part of when you're running infrastructure for Hive. How you set up your configuration, you could be any of those things.
Those nodes are all very similar and they're all parts of how the blockchain is produced. And they're all things that witnesses and infrastructure providers run. On behalf of everybody that uses this blockchain.
@moderator: And that is exactly why we, uh, uh, value that Crim is here to, to, to make things easy for everyone to understand because remember the point of this town-hall is to bring the concepts and bring the the intricacies of the blockchain of the high blockchain and make them of easy access and easy understanding for everyone on-chain, doesn't matter how, how long have you been here, but, uh, the point is to get everyone involved and, and to understand the important parts of a blockchain.
@l337m45732: I just wanted to add to that. You know, we got, we went a little in depth there. Thank you, Crim, for explaining blocks and nodes. Uh, and I feel like I need to clarify this because those questions came up.
When we talk about transactions, we're not talking about, you know, a buyer, a seller, we're talking about anything you do on Hive. So whether it's a comment, whether it's a post, whether it's a vote, maybe you do make a transaction on the internal market. All of those are transactions that happen on the blockchain.
And the producers make sure those are valid. So... Yeah, it's not just monetary things, transactions are everything that happens on the chain. It all has to be validated.
@moderator: We are about to wrap up if the, if, if someone else wants to add anything to the conversation just raise your hand and I will hand you the mic
@bookerman: We have the benefit of being a truly decentralized platform. And I know, uh, when I went out, uh, representing Woo and Hive, uh, at Rare Evo and, uh, Breathe, that was one thing that. Really blew people away that we were truly a decentralized platform, and that was a huge selling point, uh, for for us, but one of the, you know, the, the, the negatives of that is since there's no company, there's no marketing team, there's there's no one telling people what to do.
And we have to have awesome people like Crimsonclad and Eric and so many others that do these things, do these Twitter spaces, go out to these, these events, uh, and really preach Hive. And you'd be surprised when you go out to these events and how the people come together. Like, at Breathe, uh, for example, having all those people there, uh, the locals in Rare, uh, Rare Evo, having the locals there that came out and helped set things up, talk to people, uh, and did all that, it's really amazing to see a community come together and be like, look what we did, this is who we are, this is what we do.
It was a really beautiful thing and we just need more people to constantly step up, uh, and do these thankless jobs. Um, and, and, uh, I really appreciate Eric, you holding these spaces, crim, everything you do, guilty parties, uh, all the people with the value plan. Uh, again, it's, it's really amazing to see, and this is a huge asset, a huge benefit of this chain.
And that's all, that's all I wanted to end on.
@taskmaster4450: I personally think this was a great, uh, introductory, uh, town hall. We plan on having them once a month.
We may have to negotiate the day as crim said, because. Uh, there is a conflict with the Core Dev meeting, so maybe we have to move it to another Monday or another day of the week. Also, just to give a reminder, I started hosting on Friday, and I'm going to do it every week. Hopefully every Friday at 1 o'clock Eastern Time, a space is called This Week in Hive.
So if you enjoyed this, uh, it will be a similar format where I'll come on, I may have some base. Topics of what I've seen across high, but people can join. They can talk about whatever projects they're involved in, whatever projects they're utilizing, whatever they know about, whatever questions they have.
It's education. It's for information. And it's just another way to put us on spaces to put us on X that maybe somebody will come along and learn something about Hive and join the blockchain, um, and take a look at what we have to offer. So, uh, if there's nothing else, I think we should close this up.
@l337m45732: Last thing I wanted to say thank you to everyone that came on Thank you for those of you that grabbed the mic and jumped in.
See you in November 1st for the next Hive Community Town Hall Meeting.
The End
I'm waiting for the Buzz party calendar and all sorts of engagements ahead of the next townhall.
Great to see this. You created a longform version of a #threadstorm. A #poststorm
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There's something wrong with the audio on this recording.. The voice/audio is all pitched up to cartoon frequencies!
Oh thanks for the heads up.
Fixed! We added a normal version and a fastened version of the video for those who are in a rush
Thanks for explaining governance.
Thanks for listening! We'll see you for the next one in Nov 2!
Damn this points out how much I say um
Gotta work on that