I just became an orca on HIVE! What exactly does that mean?

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Hey everybody! say hello to the youngest orca on the blockchain! I'm very happy to share with you my achievement of growing my hive power to over 59,400, which officially puts me in the orca category on hivebuzz.me. Getting this cool badge on my profile is great, but I'd like to share with you some of the reasons I think it's important to grow your stake if you're a Hive citizen.

The community decides which content creators are adding value to the ecosystem

Every staked Hive token (known as Hive Power) gives your vote more weight. When content creators on the HIVE blockchain publish something that you consider valuable, you can use your vote to help them receive part of the reward pool, a portion of the new tokens that are minted every time a block is produced.

I've made a detailed explanation on how often blocks are produced, how much hive is created per block and how it's distributed in this blog post titled Hive - understanding the currency and reward system

Of course, if there are citizens who are not behaving in a manner that is in line with your values, for example, fake accounts, plagiarized content or hateful content, you can use your Hive power to vote down that type of content.

The community makes decisions on governance

One of the features of the hive blockchain that makes it so incredibly fast, is that it uses a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus protocol. This means that everybody with HP can use their vote to elect the block producers, also known as witnesses. There are hundreds of witness nodes running, all voted by community members like you and me, but only the top 20 witnesses are eligible to produce blocks.

It is the job of these few to behave in a way that represents the community, much like your elected government representatives in real life. You should vote for those witnesses who you consider trustworthy, who maintain their witness node ( you can tell by the time of their last block as well as the version fo the software they are running) and who is voting for your ideal APR% for staked $HBD.

You can check and update your witness votes here

The community decides which projects get funded by the DAO

Hive has a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) called the DHF (Decentralized Hive Fund made up in large part from the original Steem blockchain's founders' stake that got forked out. Funds in the DHF are distributed to the projects that have enough votes to meet the minimum vote requirement established by the return proposal (or threshold proposal, if you will). You get to use your vote to decide how high the return proposal is. Is it 30 million HIVE? is it 60 million? And you also get to vote on those proposals that are eligible to receive funding. but YOU NEED TO VOTE and you need to vote with as much stake as possible to make your vote count.

These are just a few of the reasons I'm happy to be an orca now. I encourage everybody to build their stake a little bit as you will benefit yourself as well as your fellow Hiveans in the process.

If you think this is a valid way of contributing to the growth of our community, consider giving this post an upvote, a tip or a HP delegation.