Pulling up or hanging on?

I'm changing my way of hiving. Not drastically, I admit, but enough to make it feel like a bigger step. September was another month of very interesting reads and comment discussions, and some ideas and approaches stuck in my head enough to start changing a few things around here.

HIVE

If I was a politician, I'd say that September was definitely a month where the fun part of HIVE surpassed the earnings aspect by far. Organic growth was only 9%, and combined with the low price of HIVE, that translated to a 60% reduction of USD value from $225 in August to $130 in September.

Though according to my formula of powering up 25% of my HBD earnings, I went ahead and did the 100 HP instead of the 89 it should be. I like round numbers, and though I really, really want to buy more Splinterlands-Cards, I'm currently not having enough time to really play the game enough, but rather spend the spare time blogging, curating and commenting.

Now, after 4 months of tracking, this graph is looking a lot better than before, don't you think? Yes, growth is slowing rapidly, I've seen that, too, but I finally managed to bust through the 5,000 HP barrier.

After doing so, I noticed the same as after getting above 2,5k HP - less votes. There still were some that voted on my content to support, and not solely for the quality, and that was a factor in reducing my earnings. While in August I still got 2 or 3 whale-votes, I didn't get any in September.

I'm a grown up now.

Yeah, as if. While the big votes were awesome, it's also a great feeling that now most of the votes come due to my content, because people like what I write or at least like me. Or maybe both? Anyway. My account has grown very fast since I started taking blogging seriously, and I've been "randomly" featured as example in Azircons interesting posts regarding Hive & Splinterlands. The latest is this one, please click here, it's worth a read.

This is my chart displayed in his post, and you can see when I started writing periodically on HIVE, mainly for Splinterlands, and then when I started to write regularly on my interests. Doesn't that look really cool?

Of course, it wouldn't have been without help. I had very good (and strict) guidance, stumbled onto communities and writers I like and was stumbled on by them, too.

Network

That network keeps growing, and I still find new people whose content I enjoy a lot. Some of them are early adapters, some are newer, some write long content, some focus on short content (snaps), some are easy reads, some break my brain, and it's a great mix that keeps me interested and engaged.

Riverflows managed to get to the top within a month of knowing her, that surprised me a little as I wasn't aware that I curate her so much. Well deserved, I must say.Stayoutofherz and Uwelang are new on the list, two people that create content in German, too - which sometimes is a nice break as it doesn't occupy as much brain power as English/Spanish.

Now, most of the list are my personal curation, and very few are from the trail that I follow. It's getting more authentic, more me, and that's a good sign to me.

Conclusion

So, why the intro? Why change my way of Hiving? Here's my image from a wonderful little tool that the fabulous Beaker007 made:

As you can see easily, I once held quite bit more HBD than I do today. I used it all to buy SPL assets in the last pre-sale. Though I'm building the position step by step, there's still a lot more potential here. And I want to harvest that potential for two reasons. 1. I get 15% interest, so I could use it as a passive income source for either more SPL assets or buying HIVE. 2. I want to get people on board to use HBD frequently in transactions, so being liquid in HBD as well as holding a nice stake can be a good argument.

In the above mentioned post by Azircon, he puts me into the "The Gradual and New Contributors (Developing Stakers)" category, and rightfully so. Here's the definitions for that, snapshot from the post:

Now, as for capital deployment, I do have a great excuse - I live and work in an underdeveloped country and do not have much spare money. But there is a truth to the definition - I never even considered HIVE as an investment. I do stocks, I do CDs (bank interest are very high here), I have a stake in a firm here, I own a business. But neither HIVE nor any other blockchain was in my scope of investing.

The more I'm talking to people here, the more I understand of the technology and the mechanisms (and I still have much to learn!), the more it shifts into that way. It doesn't feel like a scam anymore. Surprising, I know. So, yesterday, sitting at home in the evening and contemplating the fact that my business revenue was down 60% last week due to a massive strike in the region, I made the executive decision to become a "Balanced & Consistent Builder" on HIVE.

Goals

So, I defined some achievable, yet ambitious goals for myself:

1. Getting to 7500 HP by the end of 2025.
2. Grow my HBD stake by 50 or more each month until reaching 1,000 HBD.
3. Getting my KE down to 1.4 in 2025, and to 1.2 in 2026.
4. Getting 10 people on board to use HBD as transactional tool until the end of 2025.
5. Getting 5 people on board to create content on the Hive chain until the end of 2025.

I got 3 months left in 2025. Gotta hurry!

What category are you in? Is HIVE an investment for you, or just fun? How was your month? How is your network doing? And are you happy with your overall growth on HIVE?

Please feel free to engage in any original way, including dropping links to your posts on similar topics. I'm happy to read (and curate) any quality content that is not created by LLM/AI, as well as read your own experience and point of view, I love to learn!

Former posts:

June 2025 - First HPUD July 2025 - Record Earnings August 2025 - Layer by Layer