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Good day to my fellow Hivers and potential/invited/soon-to-be Hivers!

My name is Zak Ludick from Cape Town, South Africa. During the course of 2022, I have been inviting people to join Hive here and there. At first, it was my closest family and friends, but then the invitation crowd started expanding to other people that I am in contact with as well as referrals from the first group. I have even had a referral from a referral!

Thus I made new friends and gained new students! My Students of Hive Class of 2022 has really grown well over the last couple of months and has had a rather EXPONENTIAL habit of growth!

This growth is measured in value, power, and in numbers and this is really exciting. The thing that I have theorized and told people about is coming true! More about that below!

Firstly, let's cover the Guide list of previous lessons.

Guide list

This is a list of previous Guides for newcomers, or perhaps you would like to find a guide to pass on to others that has certain information on a post. Enjoy.

• A Guide for new Hive Students of 2022 - Invite and teach
• A Guide for new Hive Students of 2022 - Importance of Keys
• A Guide for new Hive Students of 2022 - Introduction Posts, credit images and tags
• A Guide for the new Hive Students of 2022 - The Golden Rules of Hive

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What makes Hive different from other Social Media and content websites?

A large pull, initially, for people to join Hive is the fact that you have the opportunity to earn from your posts and interactions. This is a majorly different attribute in comparison to regular old social posting.

Soon, however, I hope that you discover the other amazing qualities of this block-chain platform. The fact that you earn out of it becomes a great incentive for some people, but it should not be your only motivator. If you have been using other websites where you get nothing from using it and even have to pay to promote certain posts, then ask yourself what you wanted to achieve on those platforms.

You should be trying to achieve the same on Hive, while earning the money.

Socialize, share your interests, connect with people and make friends. You can do all of this on Hive. Promote your business, this is generally for the online businesses, but if our local areas obtain ADOPTION of the platform, it is possible to promote a local business, or a musician or an organization within the area you live and breathe in and everyone can receive a benefit from this.

Getting renumerated for promoting yourself? From interacting with other people's content? A crazy concept maybe, but it is real on Hive!

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It's not just the money.

The next frequent question ties in with what ELSE is special about Hive.

"Where does the money come from?"

Well, Hive is a blockchain. It does not pay you in Rands(ZAR) or USD(Dollars), it is not connected to your bank account. In the simplest terms, a post payout is given to you in terms of a cryptocurrency, that you then exchange for any currency or other cryptocurrency you want.

Before you take that value away from the platform, there are many things to DO with that earned crypto that gives you a long-term benefit into the future. In upcoming lessons I will discuss the strategies of how to grow on Hive and your goal should never be to just pull all funds. Sustainable growth comes in terms of Proof of Stake.

You can buy a lot of Hive on the market, then place that value in certain places to earn a passive income from it. Also something to be discussed in the future.

So what makes making money on a site for your content any different to the other social medias?

Well, it is a blockchain. It is decentralized.

This means no single agency controls the platform. In terms of "platform", Hive is not even just found on a single website URL. You can access this article you are reading on hive.io, peakd.com, ecency.com, leofinance.io and many more. We call these "Front Ends" and they all use the blockchain information to display a User Interface (UI) to the readers.

Different Communities on Hive can create their own front ends with a bit of effort and you can then create that website to suit a specific purpose.

I do not want to get into that too much. There is a veritable rabbit hole to go into on all of them. Generally, there is a place for everyone to do the things they already like and in the unlikely event that you do something that you cannot find on Hive, you can create your own Community for that purpose!

So "Where does the money come from?"

The cryptocurrency is minted on a regular basis on the blockchain, the time and attention of the voter which relates to the voter's Hive Power (HP) allows for the post to be rewarded out of a reward pool.

If you have a Stake of R100,000 worth of HP, you will be able to call for 100x more rewards than someone with a Stake of R1,000 worth of HP.

50% of a post value is paid in curation to the VOTERS, thus owning Stake on Hive means that you get a higher reward for voting on content.

50% of the post payout comes to the Author. This is done generally in two parts as well. Half in HP that is already staked on your account, thus growing your account, and half in HBD - Hive Based Dollar. HBD can be saved to earn interest or traded for other cryptocurrencies.

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Frequently Asked Questions Group: Is it real money? Have you actually drawn anything from it? is there a minimum withdrawl?

In short, yes its real money, yes I have drawn money, and no there is no minimums.

Between my wife and I, we have withdrawn around R5,300 from Hive this year to assist us with odds and ends, emergencies, and unplanned expenses.

The whole process to do so I will put in another post, but if you want to know right now then contact me directly and I will help you.

As for a minimum payout, there is no such thing, but if you earned R5, is it really worth your time and effort trying to withdraw such an amount? Eventually, it has to go through a fiat bank, in the South African case a "Rands bank" so you can convert your Hive gains into hard cash. There are fees and it's not worth the time or the effort to convert just R5 of Hive into Rands.

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Frequently Asked Questions Group: What can I post? Is it really decentralized? What do you mean I cannot be censored?

Generally, you can find yourself an interest group that shares your interests and post there. Gardening, gaming, music, DIY, photography, etc

It might be good here to point out that there exists on Hive a number of platforms that then mimics the UI layout of various other web 2.0 social medias... and more.

Are there things you may not post? Let's get to the sticky of this... there is even a place for adult content on Hive. But content like this should not be made accessible to people who do not want to see it. See my post: A Guide for the new Hive Students of 2022 - The Golden Rules of Hive

Essentially, you need to keep NSFW items tagged properly. You need to respect the guidelines of a community and keep relevant things on there. But you also have your own blog space. You can post on there whatever you want.

Most of the time, if you are not invading someone else's turf and spamming nonsense to them, people only need to ignore your posts if they do not like them and do not agree. But if you are posting something controversial, then maybe you want to have a debate with someone.

In that case, the usual rules apply. Generally, people on Hive tend to be more diplomatic since there can be an actual financial repercussion to bad and rude behavior.

Thus Community Rules are important!

The Community is made up of people and they will decide together what their rules are, if you don't like it, go make your own community!

Here is an example of a fairly normal rules list:

These are basic rules. You are going to find the same all over the place and you will also be warned to stay on topic. I am not about to post about my cat on this group. I post about my garden. Rather simple.

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What about censorship? Well yes, there is no big owner of Hive that can shut you down. There is a Downvote and people with REAL power in downvotes are people with lots of HP.

Thus you cannot just create an account to downvote people. Your account has to be worth lots of money to cause any harm. If your account is worth money then your own reputation is also at stake when you downvote someone.

If you invite the scrutiny of a community because you keep downvoting someone and harassing them then they can do the same to you - usually with a LOT more power.

There are those who are called Whales right in the top tiers of Hive. These are basically 37 accounts that own around 49% of the HP on the system. They are the closest thing to an authority with corruptible power on Hive.

Sure, they could at a whim suppress and bully someone, but out of those 37 accounts around 19 of them are actual people and not accounts meant to run massive community holdings or services. The people involved in this tier are generally also your people who are Witnesses and they run their operations as a business.

A Witness is essentially like a crypto Miner. But, people also need to vote for their Witnesses. You each get to choose your preferential Witnesses to churn out your blocks. They are also rewarded for this computation service.

Even whales are loathe to get too personal on something inconsequential. So unless you are doing something to the economy of Hive that is abusive, they are unlikely to get involved. Thus a regular user has less to worry about here.

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What happens if I get downvoted?

Well you have a reputation score, this goes down depending on the HP of the downvoter. As I said, unless you are abusive, nobody of any real power is going to bother downvoting you.

The post where the downvote occurs will lose its financial value and the payout will go down. If a big account does the downvote then that post easily becomes worth $0.00.

Why? Maybe someone plagiarised your work! They get reported and that post gets SMACKED by the community watch dogs, turning that effort to make money off YOUR work to zero.

Most of the time, these people will be punished several times and often the damage to their reputation is irreprible.

I am not talking about mistakes. Sometimes, you might make a small mistake and people will give you a warning and tell you how to do it properly. In this case a community moderator will simply mute your post and you have the opportunity to try again. It's really hard to get this wrong twice my mistake.

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Conclusion Question: So why Hive?

Hive is the next step in the evolution of the internet!

Web 3.0 that is a massive, modular conglomerate of people and interests. So far, the people who have established and founded this blockchain have polished all the features, rules and communities that are currently available.

New people are always welcome and I have seen newbies integrate into important positions rather quickly.

I have also seen people who just remain themselves and merely share their content and stories and become hugely successful.

You can post what interests you, you cannot be squished by a company, you can say what you want to say, you get rewarded and you OWN all your own content on here.

I will be covering the concept of Reciprocal Growth in a future post but my little class of 2022 went from a total value of around R3,200 to over R20,000 in under 8 months. I will see what happens with the rest of 2022, but I am confident that our existing future Classroom members can obtain a combined value of R80,000 in the next 8 months as well. Even obtaining R40,000 in the next 8 months would be amazing... but watch this space... the experiment of Reciprocal Growth is working...

Until next time.

Cheers!
@zakludick