Blockchain consensus is a commonly overlooked aspect of our subconscious interactions here on Hive. There is a variety of consensus protocols on Hive that minnows and newer users may not be aware of. I will list a few,

Witness Votes

• Endorse up to 20 hive users running a witness node
• Witnesses verify blocks / mine the transactions
• Different witnesses run different versions of hive

Decentralized Hive Fund Proposals

• Vote on funding proposals from developers
• Proposals above the "return proposal" are funded
• Proposals Increase the size of the rewards pool, leading to increased inflation, the return proposal prevents inflation

Downvoting

• Some Hive frontends have the downvote feature less exposed than the upvote feature
• Downvoting works visa versa to Upvoting
• If you do not like a post you are seeing, you can downvote that post to decrease the rewards of the author and their curators.

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All of these things are commonly overlooked by your average user on Hive just based on how seldom those features are used compared to others.

It would surprise you how many people have not voted for witnesses or set a witness proxy, I bet this ratio would reflect the participation in national elections around the world.

The proposals page usually gets a bit more interaction than the witnesses section due to community support, but the witness nodes are something I would really urge every Hive user to look into voting for. Read the Witness post and make up your mind, vote for witnesses you support.

If you would like to set me as your witness proxy, you can do so
here by entering phusionphil in the text field at the very bottom.

Things I look for in a witness,

• Not politicizing the blockchain, non partisan witnesses
• Max 2 of my witness votes are top 20 witnesses
• Decentralized outlook in their witness thread

If you would like to follow my downvote trail, you can do so
here. I focus on content that would not appeal to all end users. Things I downvote,

• spam (includes religion which most anti spam doesn't)
• attacks of character
• trolling after being asked to stop

I always support someone getting a good laugh for better or worse, but 1 warning is all I can really sympathize with a person needing.

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Moderation of Your Freedom of Expression

As I said above depending on which front end you use to browse the Hive blockchain, it may have a censored downvote feature. It'll be located in a drop down menu instead of right next to the upvote feature which is one of the most advocated features in regards to hive branding and onboarding of new users.

When people go about gallivanting how they "make money blogging on hive" they always leave out how much Hive Power they are backing that statement with, they're really misleading you as to the true nature of the hive blockchain.

If you want to play crony capitalism you can make more money getting educated in derrivates trading, or bond and mortgage swaps... The true nature of hive will be unlocked when we break free from these conventional capitalist mindstates that have us in bondage with the banking system.

When people try to monetize their Hive Power, it's usually exaggerated as a very broad and speculative approach to microblogging, with layer 1 blockchain technology. If you're using multiple front ends, which is less common, you may be on layer 2 blockchain levels of interoperability but thats assuming you're even aware of what you're interacting with behind the front end, the DPoS ledger the witnesses maintain.

Its likely rational to assume most Hive end users will be on layer 1 or layer 2 for the next 5 years while they figure out the potential their private keys have. If things like the Twitter sign in feature on Leo become popular, I'm aware they're not trying to popularize that either it's just there to appeal to a broader audience, those users may never even get past layer 1.

Normalization of the Downvote

When upvoting and downvoting are seeing similar usage patterns, I'm not saying one to one either, but when the common popular opinion is in to distribute upvotes to incentivize everyone to stay on the platform, the loyal users will be quickly picked out from these Fanboys that came in the early days of steem.

I think a lot of people who have been here for a long time, know that they hold back on downvoting to prevent this stigma of "scaring off new users". This stigma is what prevents hive from reaching its true potential, and thats why makeshift solutions like hivewatchers are integrated into DHF proposals to incentives solutions to problems on this platform like spam, seeing as it will be on the blockchain forever, it requires innovative solutions.

Problems We Already Have the Tools to Fix

A variety of multilateral solutions have been achieved The Hive proposals system via DHF, but what does that mean for the future?

Surely we do not want to keep renewing funding to content moderators likes @hivewatchers, @cheetah, and other voting bot style services when we already have the tools to resolve issues we are funding them to fix. In the case of spam, we already have a immediate solution to that, is a downvote trail.

Downvote Trail as a Utility

@antisocialist recently brought this to my attention, starting a downvote trail that many users, including new users could follow plus be followed back by, would give every user the downvote power of the entire network negating the chance that any undesired content was ever paid out.

As we all know, the blockchain is immutable, meaning whatever artists and authors post there would be available forever and they could feel free to develop their own front-end and have all the content show in any format they wanted.

This style of aggressive community-based downvote Trail would enable any Community member, who was also contributing to it, to also have the ability to prevent the largest whales on the network from going rogue. Original content would be preserved on the blockchain for that author to promote on their own domain, not the domains in front ends that we share as the community, where that down vote would be initiated by a community member.

We already have the tools to do this, within the communities all of us already have forged on Hive.

• hive account
• https://hive.vote
• follow the downvote trail of everyone you trust

This simple action is just the same as letting your friends know you would support the other content they have by following their curation Trail, it's the same form of support that you are giving to people who you already endorse with upvotes, but now letting them know you want them to have the power of demotion as well as promotion.