TL;DR

About $7,600 worth of Hive locked up as Hive Power is needed to keep it running. But that is held and can be withdrawn. It is also earning "curation rewards" at around 5% APR outside of what happens to the Hive vs USD price.

Hive is technically unique and its genesis made it exceptional.

Podping is a global message bus for podcast infrastructure events. Entities that publish feeds can "write" events into the system and those events are then visible to all parties who "watch" for them. Anyone can watch/monitor for events and respond appropriately, depending on their needs. It was developed as an alternative to WebSub and rssCloud which both have major drawbacks when it comes to podcasting infrastructure.

Podping sends alerts for up to 2000 podcasts per hour.

Podping sends all its updates via the Hive blockchain. Unlike most blockchain systems, every transaction on Hive is free. However resources like bandwidth, processing power, memory and long term storage are not free, so how does Hive survive (and even thrive)?

Every action on Hive uses Resource Credits. Writing a blog post, commenting on one, upvoting (liking) and all the other social functions need RCs. But RCs can't be bought or sold: every account on Hive has an allocation of RC's according to the "powered up" or invested value of the account.

The action of "powering up" Hive into Hive Power locks Hive for 13 weeks. I.e. if you lock up your Hive and then decided to "power down" subsequently, you will receive 1/13th of the power down amount every week for 13 weeks.

For example, the main @podping account (the one which this post will publish from) has 15,243 HP right now. This translates to a 27,000,000 M RC's (don't get me started on how bad for the eyes it is dealing with so many 0's).

RC's are a continually renewing resource. It takes 5 days to fully recharge your RC's and you get 20% of your max amount per day. If you use up all the RC's on your account, transactions will be rejected by witnesses until you have enough resources.

At today's prices, 15,000 HP is an investment of around $6,000. Though Hive has jumped in the last week so that number would have been $5,000. Remember that this amount is not being spent, it can be pulled out (after the 13 week power down period for all of it).

A couple of months ago Hive's internal systems changed and the system of RC's changed. Previously you could delegate Hive Power to other accounts and with that delegation of HP came Resource Credits. This was how I operated Podping with delegations of HP to the top 5 Podping sending accounts.

Following Hard Fork 26, instead of delegating Hive Power, I now delegate only Resource Credits. In the table below you will see "Out Deleg" and for the Podping account it is delegating 26,700,000 M. In addition my @brianoflondon is contributing about 7,300,000 M right now and a little from @v4vapp.dhf.

The cost of transacting on Hive has gone up. I said earlier that transactions are free and they are, but the resources of Hive are not unlimited and access to RCs is the way we keep the chain operating at reasonable costs.

This is a graph of RC costs for sending a 200 byte custom_json: that's pretty much what every Podping is. Note the price here has 6 extra 0's compared to the RC numbers I use which are all Millions.

And I've noticed this uptick in costs but now I'm going to show you something amazing.

This is the bit that takes a lot to understand. The change from delegating Hive Power HP to delegating Resource Credits made the Podping account more useful to me. One of the other benefits of HP is deciding how much your upvotes on a post are worth. More HP, the more value your upvote is to both the recipient and the voter. This is called the "curation reward".

When I was delegating HP to multiple sub accounts, it would have been complex and time consuming to "vote" and earn curation rewards with all that delegated HP. So I didn't. Now that the HP remains concentrated in the @podping account I took the time to set it up to follow my @brianoflondon activity.

The result is that @podping has earned around 64 HP or $25 in the last 30 days. This adds up and is around 5% APR. So instead of costing money, Podping earns some.

Hive is not magic and there is no VC money or corporation pumping in cash. People like me run the infrastructure. My Witness is way down in 83rd position but it has recently started earning the same $50 per month it costs to rent it. I actually use it for Podping and @v4vapp but it's now paying for itself.

You can break even running infrastructure relatively easily on Hive but you have to be an active community member and sociable. Compare that to trying to recoup the investment on an ASIC miner for Bitcoin or even earn enough in routing fees on Lighting to pay for a Raspberry Pi. I still haven't managed that.

Hive's economics seem to work and the unique nature of how this whole system is kept running is perfect for the censorship resistant and decentralised system we needed for Podping.

Will it cost more in the future? Probably, RC costs will rise but even now we are using a tiny fraction of Hive's capacity and storage is not growing fast enough to be a problem.

And as the costs grow and as the all the other nonsense in the crypto world falls away, what will be left standing are systems like Hive which have real utility beyond and above the simple store of wealth of Bitcoin or payment systems like Lightning.

For the last few months while building @v4vapp I was generously supported by the DHF. Going forward I have a much more modest support which covers direct server costs and a little of my time.

If you appreciate the work I do on and around Hive, you can express this directly: upvoting posts on Hive is great. Also consider a direct donation (there's a Tip button on Hive or a Lightning Address) on all my posts.