I just finished an AMA with the Turkish Huobi community together with @theycallmedan that was hosted in their Telegram. The AMA was requested by them following the very successful AMA that Huobi Global had last week. Here, we were asked questions that their community had about HIVE following the listing on Huobi.

First of all, I was really happy going into the event, as I had already seen good engagement from people asking questions about HIVE and showing genuine interest on comments to their own Tweet on Twitter (see their Tweet here), as well as on my own Reweet here.

You can see their announcement below: The first announcement post going out with their Tweet. Another one with Dan followed shortly

It was also cool to see their interest from the admins in the Telegram organizing the AMA themselves in joining Hive. I hope you will all give a warm welcome to @akarsuirfan who is a "Huobi Knight" (moderator) in the Turkish Huobi Telegram who signed up just prior to the AMA to share a post about it here.

Transcript of my questions and answers

While the AMA was mostly done in Turkish, Dan and I gave our answers in English which were then translated. Here is a full record of all the questions in English that I was asked, and my replies to them:

Twitter question 1: In the old chain, main development company of the chain was sponsoring some of the dapps via delegations. Hive is a decentralized community and not backed by a company, but dapps and projects need HP delegations to grow. Do you think these projects have a hard time finding delegations?

My answer:

Both of us have dApps that used to have a delegation from Steemit. We both considered a new fork to be the best way forward despite knowing it would mean losing those. It is my opinion that a business on Hive should not depend on having a delegation, and if so, that it should be an up-front investment that the business owners themselves make similar to how other normal businesses may have to acquire a facility or machinery to grow its production. I believe that by having businesses need to buy HIVE rather than relying on a free delegation that then reduce the value of other stakeholder’s votes, we are instead creating more demand for the token. Also, if a dApp believe it adds great value to the ecosystem, or can provide added returns if it has a delegation, then community members can easily delegate to those dApps either to help them grow the ecosystem (and thus the value of their investment) or to get a share of their revenue in return. The delegation feature which allow any stakeholder to support projects they believe in without risking or giving away their funds is in my opinion one of the main strengths of Hive and a good reason to buy and hold the token.

Twitter qestion 2: Can we contribute to development of HIVE or the projects living on HIVE? If yes, who reviews the requests and decide about this?

My answer:

Yes! Many community members are already contributing actively to different Hive apps or Hive itself. There is plenty of demand for more people interested in helping with marketing, design, development, and otherwise growing the community. Some of this gets done with proposals through the DHF (decentralized hive fund), while others make posts on the blockchain sharing their work that is then upvoted by users who liked the contribution. In both of those cases, it is anyone who holds HIVE tokens that decide if it gets funded or by how much (as Hive Power is used to allocate new rewards from inflation). There are also many dApps owners, including myself, who are happy to pay users in in HIVE or HBD for different forms of help. If so, just reach out! I'm sure many of the dapps on hive.io would be happy to hear from you.

We then got a tsunami of questions in Telegram once the mods opened the room for those there to ask. Please bear in mind that we had very limited time to not only pick the questions we wanted to answer, but also to then write those and have them translated.

Telegram question 1: Why Hive?

My answer:

I believe in Hive, because it offers a low-barrier gateway into blockchain for the masses and solves real world problems. Social media and blogging is something that the majority of the people on the web already participate in, so allowing people to get a crypto-wallet by signing up for a social media account can be a great strategy for growing a token economy.

I liked this relatively open question because it offered a chance to share what I believe is a very powerful winning strategy for Hive that many may not have thought about. I try to pick the questions that give me the best chance to share information about Hive, or a strong value proposition, that I believe can convince people.

Telegram question 2: I know HIVE is the main currency of the blockchain, but there is also HBD. Can you please explain what's HBD and what is the purpose of HBD in the ecosystem?

My answer:

HBD (Hive Backed Dollars), is a stable coin pegged to USD. Users on Hive receive HBD as rewards for posts and comments, developers and contributors receive it from the dev fund (DHF), and businesses, apps and individuals often price services they offer on-chain in HBD due to it being stable. It can either be traded on the market, or converted to 1 USD worth of HIVE tokens through a 3.5 conversion period based on average market prices of HIVE. It tries to solve the problems of and people needing a more stable currency for their trade on chain.

Telegram question 3: Can you guys give us some information about Smart Media Tokens?

My answer:

SMTs will allow anyone to create their own crypto currency with features similar to HIVE without needing to be a developer. They can then set their preferred rules for inflation, token supply etc, and have their own ICO on HIVE to raise funds. Smart Media Tokens are currently on the testnet but its exact release date is yet to be made. Following the HIVE hardfork, the community will have to decide how it will release SMTs. The good news is that our witness happens to have been the one doing the testing for Smart Media Tokens, so we are very familiar with the code. It is my opinion that we could have them ready before the end of the year, but this will be a community and stakeholder decision as to when exactly.

We then both got asked to describe what plans Hive has for 2020.

Dan's answer:

The plans for 2020 is to continue work on SMTs, scaling with Resource delegation to help with quicker easier onboarding, and to include more people in the decentralized hive fund to help build and grow the ecosystem.

Here I felt the need to add something given that the exact plans for 2020 are not yet decided and will have to follow community consensus.

I thus added my answer:

I'll add that there is a well of ideas that people have had for things we can do throughout our 4 year history. Many of us are excited to now be able to pursue many of those ideas we've had as a community. The exact priority for 2020 will have to be released one at a time following a community discussion.

I also thought that there are a lot more exciting things on the horizon beyond what was on the previous roadmap prior to the fork, and thus wanted to add how many of us are just as excited about revisiting old ideas:

In the end, we were asked to give a message to the Turkish community. I thought this was a good opportunity to encourage as many as possible to come and join Hive, and thus thought I would add some context of my own journey and positive experience that could serve as social proof:

Final message to the Turkish community.

My answer:

I hope to see many of you around on Hive! I myself joined because I was curious about crypto and because I wanted to write stories about my work in the space sector. To my surprise, I ended up making a lot of new friends there and even earned a good amount of money. Now I am building my own projects on it and feel like I'm part of a movement that I believe in. I hope some of you will want to check it out, and I'll be happy to give any type of help that I can to those interested :) Happy Ramadan 2020!

I am happy to hear from the Turkish Hive users present that the overall reception was very positive. It seems we will be joined by quite a few new signups from people present at the AMA, which is what I had also hoped for going in. The Huobi team also expressed interest in working more closely with Hive, so I would not be surprised to see more cool collaborations happening.

Also a BIG shoutout to @emrebeyler who also helped out a lot both before and during the AMA to curate questions for us to answer and also help with translations and communications, as well as after by providing free accounts to those interested.

I hope this can be the first of many similar activities that attempt to reach out to other crypto-communities and other interest groups where there is room for collaboration. We've started on an amazing journey that we ought to tell the world about!