What is Hive SBI?
Hive Stake Based Income (Hive SBI) is an account-based curation program. You sponsor accounts for regular ongoing curation, and then you receive back curation rewards as upvotes on your own content. This empowers both accounts to earn a sustainable crowdfunded basic income.
It Started So Simple
The overall design of Hive SBI is pretty simple. Based on total HP, the accounts can support a certain amount of upvote value per day. While the HP available to upvote gradually increases over time, the real value available to distribute via upvotes is directly correlated to HIVE price. For the sake of argument, let's call it $40 per day, which is approximately correct at the time of publication.
This $40 per day needs to be fairly distributed across all Hive SBI members, so it gets allotted pro rata based on voting unit levels. At present, there are roughly 1 million voting units.
Simplified, that's $40 / 1000000 = 0.00004 per day in pending upvote balance accrual.
All done! Pretty simple, right?
Upvote Value Boundaries
Those 1M units are distributed across ~17k member accounts, with 4406 accounts having provided all of the HIVE enrollment value subsequently powered up into HP. That's a lot of accounts, and many of them would only get that 0.00004 per day. The Hive rewards mechanism cuts off all payouts below $0.02. To prevent spamming out dust votes, we designed the program so that members accrue a pending upvote balance, which accumulates until members have enough for an $0.021 vote. This cuts down upvote frequency dramatically, but it adds to the complexity of the program.
Accruing a pending balance also means that all members get the same value per unit per time interval, regardless of posting frequency! That means that instead of having to post every day, members can take their time to create something of quality, and still get their full benefit. Hive SBI encourages members to slow down and do their best work, so that it will attract other voters as well, instead of a misplaced incentive to post every day, regardless of quality.
In the case of delay between delivering a vote and removing its actual value from a member's pending balance, it was possible for a member to post again and overdraw their pending balance. We introduced a delivery ratio to eliminate these edge cases. Only 1/3 of member pending balance can be delivered by a single vote. It was originally at 1/5, but we found 1/3 to be more than adequate to manage the risk and results in tighter delay between voting unit increases and vote values received.
Voila! Emergent complexity! It's now too complicated for most people to follow. Thus the simplified rubric: voting units means upvotes. Or in the eyes of our detractors, payment means upvotes. We believe this is a vast oversimplification that ignores the actual design of our program, but we do understand the perspective.
Distribution
Only 35% of accounts receiving upvotes from Hive SBI have ever paid anything. Of course the unit distribution is much more concentrated among paid members. After all, for every 2 units created at least 1 is a paid member (and if the second goes to somebody who has ever sent even 1 HIVE to 'try things out' then both are marked as belonging to a paid member. Most paid members actually have a mix of 'sponsored' units and 'enrolled' units.
We're pretty impressed that the average units held by free members is almost 14. Our paid members are doing a great job of distributing out value to others!
Inactivity
From there, another problem emerges. If we just distribute every unit a vote value of 0.00004 every day, it's completely fair, but it underutilizes the voting power of the accounts. Most of the time, our voting accounts would sit at 100% and waste their curation power, because of delays in member posting frequency and the growing level of inactive accounts. To manage this problem, we increase the pending balance accrual rate. In essence, all active members receive slightly higher upvote values due to the existence of inactive accounts.
This gives rise to a whole host of other issues, since the return of inactive or semi-active members cannot be predicted or accurately modeled, only managed around. We will write more about this issue in a subsequent post, as it deserves a more detailed treatment.
Abuse management
Our terms include several specific abuse categories, along with a more generic "anything that we think is abusive". To facilitate this, we skip all posts from various tags, communities, and dapps, along with maintaining a 'skiplist' designation in our database that turns off all votes for accounts that earn the designation.
If you see a pattern of Hive SBI votes on abusive content or accounts, please let us know in our Discord. We have a channel for that! In the future, this will be managed using votes from HSBIDAO tokenholders.
From Simple to Complex
This post provides an overview of the initial complexity of Hive SBI's design mechanics. We try for the simplest possible design to manage all of the intended results, and then iterate as we go. Because human behavior is complex, managing around the various cases while treating all members as fairly as possible results in emergent complexity.
These challenges evolve over time, and our current development roadmap is oriented around better solutions, more member flexibility and control, and better positioning for a sustainable future.
Hive SBI Enrollment
To curate accounts using Hive SBI, enrollment is pretty straightforward:
Just send 1 HIVE to @steembasicincome. Include the name of a Hiver to sponsor in the transaction memo (preceded by @). You and the person you sponsor will each receive 1 voting unit in the program for each 1 HIVE. You can sponsor any active Hiver (except for yourself); it does not have to be a current member.
This is an open-access program. You do not already have to be a Hive SBI member to enroll. You just have to sponsor another Hive account.
The official currency for enrollment is HIVE. HBD transactions are only accepted for auto-transfer functions, not for member enrollment. Enrollments are processed automatically every 144 minutes.
To tokenize your Hive SBI voting units, send 0.001 HBD per voting unit to @steembasicincome, with sbi-tokens in the transaction memo. There is a minimum transaction size of 0.005 HBD, and anything smaller will be ignored. This will transfer your voting units to @sbi-tokens and it will issue HSBIDAO tokens to you in return. If you send more HBD than is needed, the excess will be refunded to you by @sbi-tokens.
If you have questions, please ask in the comments section or join us in our discord channel.
You can check your member level at https://www.hivesbi.com/ or view our new reporting dashboards. The new dashboards also include your HSBIDAO token holdings.
I was actually wondering how the voting worked. I noticed the votes sometimes appearing in my notifications and was curious as to what the general structure behind it was given how it seemingly had no obvious routine to it.
Had no idea things were as complex as they are.
It's amazing how much complexity can emerge from relatively simple rules! It definitely feels much more random for free members like yourself, because it takes time for enough pending balance to accumulate to support each $0.021 upvote.
It has typically been a more consistent experience for members with enough voting units to assure an upvote on every post (although things are weird right now! we will go into more detail in our next planned post).
ChronoCrypto Data Check
Hive at 0.10 and the New Reality of SBI Yield
The numbers do not lie. With Hive sitting near 0.10 and curation rewards reduced, the entire yield landscape shifts. This is not doom. It is data. It is a recalibration of expectations and a reminder that Hive is a cyclical asset, not a fixed income product.
Current Conditions
Hive at 0.10 means vote value across the chain is compressed by roughly sixty to seventy percent compared to the last cycle. SBI payouts that once cleared dust thresholds daily now stretch into multi day cycles for small accounts. The system did not break. The math simply shrank. Lower price equals lower dollar value per vote and slower payout velocity.
Curation reduction adds another drag. Less curation means slower HP growth which weakens the daily vote pool for SBI. Compounding slows. Passive earning slows. Active users still benefit but the flywheel takes longer to spin up.
Why SBI Still Matters
SBI is not a short term income engine. It is a position that gains power as Hive reprices. When Hive went from 0.12 to 3.00 in the last cycle SBI unit value multiplied overnight without changing anything inside the system. That is the hidden edge. You accumulate when the chain is cheap and you let the system revalue itself later.
The Play Today
Right now this is accumulation season. Yield is low but unit cost is cheap. The system favors those who stay active and keep posting while the market sleeps. When Hive wakes up SBI becomes a yield vault again.
This is the data reality. This is the cycle. This is the ChronoCrypto view.
I mostly agree. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
It was clearly AI generated. It has al the hallmarks of AI generation, like the sectioning and the awkward metaphors ("the data reality") and the saying a lot of words while saying very little. Though, curiously, there is no em dash, so...
Thanks 🙏 . Although I am a data scientist 👨💻 I appreciate your thoughts even though you say very little.
Which AI models are you using that have this level of understanding of Hive ecosystem? Whenever I try them out they don't know diddly even if I give specific sources they should reference for context.
!ALIVE
Your post has been manually reviewed for curation by the Principality of Bastion.
Ithara Gaïan
Principality of Bastion - Our Leit Motiv? Uniti Crescimus.
!PIZZA
Your post has been manually reviewed for curation by the Principality of Bastion.
Ithara Gaïan
Principality of Bastion - Our Leit Motiv? Uniti Crescimus.
$PIZZA slices delivered:
@itharagaian(1/20) tipped @steembasicincome
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