What is Hive SBI?

Hive Stake Based Income (Hive SBI) is an account-based curation program. You sponsor accounts for regular ongoing curation, and then you receive back curation rewards as upvotes on your own content. This empowers both accounts to earn a sustainable crowdfunded basic income.

Members regularly accrue pending balance, and when their pending upvote balance is high enough, they receive an upvote on their latest post (or next post if their latest post is older than 24 hours), from one or more of our curation accounts.

Quality of Life Improvements

At the request of some of our power-users (especially @ecoinstant, who is constantly begging me to let him give away his massive stacks of Pending Vote Balance) we have released three massive quality of life improvements this week.

1. Transaction memo support to give away your pending balance
   

2. Transaction memo support to transfer your Hive SBI units

3. Automated VP management

Let's take it one at a time

Pending Balance Transfers - the "Lovegun"

For most of you, these changes will have little to no impact. For a few members, the combination of high Hive SBI levels and low posting frequency results in a steadily growing pending vote balance.

I think it's fairly obvious that @ecoinstant does not expect to receive all of this 'pending balance estimate' on his posts. No matter how high the 'next vote estimate' we can still only deliver 100% upvotes from 10 voting accounts, and it's only a few dollars a post.

With a small transaction memo, @ecoinstant can have pending balance transferred to another account. He has been calling this release the 'lovegun'.

In order to avoid handling other micro-transaction memos incorrectly, this has a relevant range of 0.005 HIVE to 0.999 HIVE, and it multiplies by 1000. This 0.020 HIVE example transfers $20 of pending upvote balance from @ecoinstant to @powerpaul. Any transfer below 0.005 will be ignored (or handled manually, depending on what it is) and any transfer above 1 will be handled as a normal enrollment transaction.

Please do not build vote selling services around this functionality! This is for using your own pending balance to freely support others!

Automated Hive SBI unit transfers

With the same syntax rules (meaning a minimum of 5 units and a maximum of 999), you can instead send HBD to have your Hive SBI units transferred.

With this transfer, @thecrazygm requests us to transfer 5 of his Hive SBI units to @ecoinstant:

And voila!

If you have a need to transfer 1000 or more transactions, you can break it up into multiples.

Yes, this means there is a small processing fee of 0.001 HBD per unit transferred. If you are selling your units over-the-counter, whether you add the fee to your sale price is between the buyer and seller.

Dynamic VP Management

This affects everyone, but in a way that will soon fade into the background. When Hive SBI began, we had complicated formulas to adjust the rate at which members accrue their pending vote balance and keep everything at a sustainable level. Over time we realized that if we target 50% VP and just let everything run it was a lot easier and had the same result.

The obvious downsides of manual management: If high balance accounts awaken, it drags VP down really quickly, and when we finally noticed we would need to cut accrual rates severely, to let VP recover.

Once VP recovered, we would again need to act quickly to boost accrual rates and stabilize VP to keep if from climbing too high (and potentially getting wasted). These intermittent slash and burn tactics have a very noticeable impact on vote values for most active users. We just went through a round of this, and some of you definitely noticed!!!

With this release, we automatically check VP at every accrual round and modify accrual rates a modest amount. If VP is above target, we increase accrual rates by 1%. If VP is below target, we decrease rates by 1%. We do this 10x per day (accrual rounds are every 2.4 hours).

When VP is high (right now), pending balance accrual rates compound more than 12% in a day. When VP rates are below 50%, pending balance accrual rates can reduce by more than 12% in a day.

Theoretically, once we get back to 50% VP, we will enter a semi-stable equilibrium. Pending balance accrual rates will alternately increase and decrease every round as VP% bobs up and down around the goal. We will monitor and adjust as needed, but right now VP is gradually falling, as expected.

Enrollment

If you want to curate accounts using Hive SBI, enrollment is pretty straightforward:

Just send 1 HIVE to @steembasicincome. Include the name of a Hiver to sponsor in the transaction memo (preceded by @). You and the person you sponsor will each receive 1 unit in the program. You can sponsor any active Hiver (except for yourself), it does not have to be a current member.

The official currency for enrollment is HIVE. If we choose to accept HBD without refunding it, you do not receive extra value for it. Enrollments are processed automatically every 144 minutes.

Most questions are addressed in our FAQ. If you still have questions, ask in the comments section or join us in our discord channel.