Hello everyone, you are welcome to my blog and the @hive-reachout community, a community set to promote humanity through charitable donations and advertising Hive, Onboarding and Nuturing Newbies On Hive..

I am glad I've finally put this down to writing and I hope it educates all the newbies we've brought onboard and other intermediate Hivians. I've wanted to discuss the issue of staking for a long time and it's importance because it seems that side is overlooked a little bit.

What's Staking?

Staking on Hive simply means powering up or locking up some part of your earnings and enjoying the rewards that comes with it.

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For a thriving system like Hive, the benefits of staking is beyond the cash back we get inform of curation reward and the APR assigned for every amount of Hive Power (H.P) you stake. Staking on Hive Blockchain provides us with more benefits of which I will try to list few in this post.
Does Staking your Hive means you're locking away your rewards and never going to get it back? The answer is No..
Whatever amount of Hive you stake up is completely your funds and you can take them just when you need them although you may find reasons to stake more instead of powering down your staked Hive after reading this post. Staked Hive is simply known as Hive Power, your Hive tokens are not Hive Power until when you stake it. For the reason of this post, I'll use H.P in place of Hive Power or staked Hive..

Staking in other terms means investing so, what could be the reason you want to withdraw all your investments specially from a system you're benefiting from and even earned those rewards from?
Well, let's look at the benefits of staking.

Benefits of Staking Your Hive or Powering up..

1. You get to earn via curation reward. You earn curation rewards from the payouts of every post you cast a vote on. The more your H.P the more your curation rewards.

2. Your vote value increases with time as you continue to accumulate more H.P, your vote value is directly proportional to your H.P, so your curation rewards is determined by your vote value. This means that you'll get to earn more rewards in curating and voting posts if you accumulate more Hive power.

3. Accumulating more Hive power provides you with more resource credits to carry out more activities on Hive Blockchain, this means lack of resource credits will limit how far you can vote, comment and publish more post on Hive.

4. You'll get to earn more rewards via the 3% APR for every staked Hive and you earn more APR when you continue to perform more task on Hive.

5. You'll get to participate in the Hive governance:- This means your votes for decision makers on Hive Blockchain will count more when you stake more..

6. Your votes will also count more when you vote for proposals for DHF and witnesses. These simply implies that, the more your stake the more voice you'll have on the system because only proposals with higher total number of votes will be qualified for Decentralized Hive Finding.

These are the 6 benefits of acquiring more HP on Hive.

How Do I Stake?

For every post you make on Hive, the reward system is set automatically for 50% Hive Backed Dollar(HBD) and 50% Hive Power (HP). The HBD can instantly be converted to Hive and traded for whichever currency of your choice. The Hive Power (HP) is automatically staked after you claim your rewards, and can only be totally withdrawn after 13 weeks pending period..
However, you can still convert some HBD to Hive and power up or even save part of your HBD for APR rewards..

This is where I'll be wrapping this post. It is understood that the HBD and HP are 100% your rewards after you have claimed them but there's a special way to prove your love for the system and that is investing in the long term view of Hive Blockchain. Thanks to @livinguktaiwan for shading more light to this in most of her comments and kind advices on several occasions about this, I have really digested the whole idea and it's very rational to even begin with.

Several times we have newbies in their early stage on Hive withdrawing everything and even powering down their stake. I understand you're in full ownership of your rewards and may choose to do whatever you want to do with your funds but it's giving a bad narrative about your passion for Hive. Hive a thriving ecosystem and from my little experience so far about the Blockchain, it is the unity of the community that keeps the system thriving, there's a genuine love for the ecosystem by the community members whom in diverse ways carry out different obligations and tasks that promotes and keeps the ecosystem moving forward..

The best way to show you love the system is by investing in the long term view of the platform. I understand some of us make a living from Hive but this is just to reshape the thoughts you have for Hive specially to my onboardees and every other Hiver out there. You can focus on investing more than you withdraw, the least that should come to your mind even if powering down your stake. You're not up to a year on year with less than 1k Hive but already powering down everything..? Some persons power down to oblivion even and sincerely the community can't move forward like that if everybody decides to take away all their stake. This post is just for educational purposes and I hope it explains few things you need to know about your stake and why you need to save more than you take away..