This post is my story of finding the Hive blockchain and my journey to 10,000 HP.
Over the past couple of weeks, @azircon published two posts where he examined the account history of six different Hive accounts, including mine. The first is Confidence and Commitment, the second is How SPS Stakeholders and Staking HP and HBD?
I really appreciate that he selected my account as part of his examination. Instead of writing a long reply to the original posts, I feel it is a good time to write a full post about my own journey on Hive.
The data from these posts is fascinating, and I learned quite a bit about my own account history and behavior from the information and charts that azircon created. Here is a copy of his table that includes my investor profile and key mindset & strategy.
Reading this table, I am surprised at how accurately it assesses my own mindset. This analysis made me think a lot about my history on Hive and how I ended up where I am today. So, here goes my story.
Image created with Google AI Nano Banana
How I Found Hive
How did I find the Hive blockchain? My journey to Hive started with listening to a podcast. It was Tim Ferriss Episode 542 with Chris Dixon and Naval Ravikant. At the time, in October 2021, the popularity of web 3 and blockchain was high. I was trying to learn as much as I could about the technology.
This podcast episode was the first time I heard the concept of "Play to Earn" gaming. If you search the episode transcript for "YGG" you will find the section that caught my attention the most.
Soon after listening to this podcast, I began my search to find a "play to earn" game and to learn more about YGG. I did the typical searching online, and the most appealing options were Axie Infinity and Splinterlands. The cost to start playing Axie was more than I wanted to spend. Because of that, I decided to try Splinterlands because it was "only" $10 for a spellbook to get started (if I only knew😂).
Splinterlands
I kept this section brief, as I don't think it's unique or interesting, and many players will have a similar story if they started around the same time as I did.
I joined Splinterlands in late 2021, right before the release of the Chaos Legion card set. Like many others, I bought a ~$40 Djinn Oshannus and a ~$5 Vernai Wavesmith (one BCX/CC) to use with Alric in the water splinter.
I read lots of articles about Splinterlands strategy and investing. At the time, I didn't have any idea what Hive was and didn't realize all of these articles were part of the Hive blockchain even though I was reading them on Ecency, Leo, PeakD, and Splintertalk. I still have bookmarked this one from @libertycrypto27, which was a big factor in my decision to jump into the deep end of Splinterlands (yes, I need to clean up my bookmarks!).
Buying SPS
Please note that I did not own any NFTs or cryptocurrency prior to playing Splinterlands. It was quite an educational experience trying to buy SPS for the first time.
At the time, cards on the market were expensive, and most advice was to wait and buy packs. To buy packs, I understood you had to have vouchers (later, I learned that was only for the pre-sale), and you needed SPS staked to get vouchers.
It's a long story, but after much reading and asking questions, I eventually managed to purchase $500 of SPS on Binance US, which was about 250 SPS tokens at .50 each at the time. It took several months before Binance would verify my identity and let me transfer the SPS in-game for staking. By that time, the pre-sale was over, I didn't need vouchers. I was mostly fed up with trying to buy any more tokens and gave up for the time; it seemed too complicated.
Here is my SPS staking chart over time, from the previously linked article by azircon.
At my highest point, I topped out around 270,000 staked SPS. I've since reduced my stake, more on that later.
Most of the money I spent on Splinterlands after Binance was spent by purchasing credits with PayPal and buying cards or packs in-game. Most of the SPS I collected over the years came from airdrops, staking rewards, and battle rewards. Although I did buy some SPS (with DEC) before the Conclave Arcana sale.
Yield Guild Games (YGG)
Guilds are a major part of Splinterlands. For me, they (YGG) have been the primary social glue that has kept me involved. The first guild I joined was Immortal Phoenix (shout out to @phoenixrising1, @ithaka, and @tomathellama, who are still there). I enjoyed my time there and it was a good group of players.
At the time, I was looking for a guild that was more competitive and active. I found a post on Reddit from @nameless112 recruiting for the YGG Brawlers guilds. I was already familiar with YGG from the previously mentioned podcast episode, and I was excited for the opportunity to be a part of YGG.
On March 10, 2022, I joined YGG "Brawlers 2" which eventually re-branded to YGG Brawlers Niflheim when our guilds rebranded with the Norse Mythology theme.
Over time, I became more involved in YGG, guild leadership, and YGGSPL sub-dao governance. I still hold a few thousand YGGSPL tokens and was fortunate enough to earn about 10,000 YGG tokens over the years as part of the GAP quests.
Discovering Blogging
Besides reading the previously mentioned strategy posts, my first introduction to Hive blogging was reading the Splinterstats season report cards posted by community members using the tool created by @kiokizz. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about people's seasonal progress and found it gave me something to aspire towards.
My first post on Hive was this season report card on December 22, 2021.
This was long before I knew that people got rewards from posting. My main goal was to keep track of my account progress from week to week by posting report cards.
It took several months for me to discover that there were other communities and topics to blog about. My initial impression of Hive was that it was only for gaming. How wrong I was!
My First Hive Power
My first hive power-up was in September 2022. The reason I did the power-up was that I needed resource credits to run my Splinterlands rentals. At the time, rental cards were popular and there were bot services to automatically re-price cards.
Looking at my past season report cards, I remember that I was compounding rental income into hive power to see up with resource credits and rental performance.
Shifting Conviction
Fast forward a few years and you can see how my convictions have shifted from SPS to Hive. Early on, I was "all in" on Splinterlands. I was confident that web3 gaming was the way of the future. In some ways, I still think it is. However, it might still be too early.
Over time, I've realized that I don't have the budget or time to keep up with Splinerlands at the top levels. In the past several months, I've shifted a lot of my Hive assets from Splinterlands to Hive/HP.
Image created with Google AI Nano Banana
Zooming in on the previous chart, you see the orange line (SPS) dropping and the teal line (HP) increasing in the same time period. I've maintained 200K SPS staked, and many of my CL and other cards at max level, just enough to keep playing wild, brawls, and survival. The rest I have sold, or am selling, to put into HP.
10,000 Hive Power
Yesterday I reached 10,000 HP. This is a big milestone for me. This is the first year that I've started to get real growth blogging on Hive, making social connections, and discovering many of my favorite communities such as Reflections, Worldmappin, Weekend Experiences, Finance and Economy, Hive Book Club, and Praetoria.
Here is a look at my balance history thanks to this fantastic tool from @beaker007.
For the foreseeable future, I plan to spend more time writing on Hive and growing my HP when and where I can. I've been writing for many years on other platforms, but I find Hive to be much more satisfying for several reasons.
If you want to know a little more about me, I was on episode 30 of The People's Guild.
Thanks for reading about my Hive journey!
Reading that one of my posts was decisive in making you appreciate Splinterlands makes me very happy. Although seeing how much my card collection was worth in 2021 didn't make me very happy :)
Congratulations on reaching 10K HP, which is a great achievement that shows you care about Hive.
I am still very convinced that Hive will take its rightful place in the blockchain landscape, which should be much, much higher than its current position.
!PIMP
!discovery 30
I re-read that post and was thinking the same thing on your behalf! 😭 How the times have changed.
That post had a big impact on me, I think I started following and reading all of your posts not long after that. I appreciate all the writing you do here!
Congrats on reaching 10K Hive.
Thanks for sharing your journey.
Thank you, and you're welcome! 😀
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Cograts in reaching your 10k milestone🥳🎉lately I've been struggling on choosing on what is more sustainable the long term asset or the game assets. But after this I can now more decide what should I choose