So if you missed the teaser by @blocktrades and then the official hive announcement by @hiveio you might be a little confused about the honey coated buzz that is spreading around the Blockchain.

Many people have been asking me if I will be running a Witness on Hive, will I still be on Steem, what do they have to do? This is my full rundown, packaged into my easy to understand way of looking at things - it might not be exactly correct and I welcome anyone to point out my mistakes in the comments. I am now at my three year anniversary on the Steem Blockchain, and over that time I have made many good friends, met amazing people and I will continue to remain available to you all for as long as you wish to put up with me. I'm active in most community discords and if you mention me in any I will be quick to respond, and I am active in the new Hive discord

What do I have to do right now to join HIVE blockchain?

Absolutely nothing, on Friday March the 20th a snapshot of the Steem Blockchain will be taken, and at that point the Hive Blockchain will commence a fork separate to Steem. At that point your exact position on Steem will be replicated on Hive - that is all liquid Steem, Steem Power and SBD will be replicated on the Hive Blockchain but in the new token variation.

To make this as absolutely simple as possible, think of the Steem Blockchain as a book where every page is filled with transactions, posts, comments, upvotes - everything you have done on the Steem Blockchain since you joined is on the pages of that book. On Friday that book will be replicated - an exact copy, but from then the new Hive copy will only have the things you do on Hive added to it's new pages. The Steem book will also have everything you did in the past - but from Friday it will only have the transactions you continue to make on the Steem Blockchain.

Once the Hive fork is live you can choose to make use of the front ends and dapps that support it to interact as you always have, your account and keys will be transferred and the same as on Steem (now is a good time to hard copy your keys so you have them safe, once the chain forks you can keep the same keys on both or for security change the keys on one - or both as you see fit)

The most important thing I can stress to you all is - you literally have to do nothing. If you want to stick with the Steem Blockchain - nothing changes. If in six months time you fancy looking at Hive Blockchain - you can head over and log in with your keys - that are current as of Friday 20th March - so again hard copy them now to ensure there are no issues in future.

Which is Better - Steem or Hive?

I can not tell you which is better, all I can say is that from my perspective since the unexpected announcement that Steemit Inc had sold their business, and a supermajority stake of Steem Tokens (that were always agreed to be used for Blockchain development purposes only) to Tron - everything that Tron has done since then has been hostile.

I fully supported the soft fork 22.2 to prevent misuse of the Steemit Inc Ninja Mine tokens - they were never supposed to be used for Witness voting or indeed general voting - and the new owners made no effort to contact any of our Steem Blockchain Witnesses and explain what they planned. After well over a week of no contact protecting the decentralised governance of our Blockchain was essential. Nothing was stolen, the tokens held by Tron were simply locked by the soft fork which could easily be reversed once a dialogue was finally achieved and both parties could agree with a way forward.

The subsequent hijacking of exchange funds to force Tron Witnesses into a position of control of the Steem Blockchain so they could effectively change anything they liked without consulting anyone - absolutely justified the soft fork 22.2 - Tron did exactly what they were expected to do - they just found a sneaky way to do it that nobody thought of.

It is a credit to DPOS and all our stakeholders that through a combined effort of Witness voting we were able to position ten of our own original Witnesses in the top 10 slot, ensuring that Tron could not change the Blockchain direction without agreement. But the battle quickly escalated when you have an almost unlimited amount of funding behind you, buying in additional Steem in the hundreds of thousands to push position and of course sweet talking existing holders is easy - the stand off has remained for weeks and no reasonable outcome seems possible.

Will you be a HIVE Witness

I believe the HIVE fork is the right way to go, it enables Tron and anyone supporting them to continue with Steem as they see fit. On Hive we will have our existing active and long supporting Witnesses, and will see new and exciting developements in Blockchain, Hive also has support from the majority of DAPPS we all love and use.

As a Witness I have two active Servers running, my primary Witness server will be moved over and running HIVE as soon as it goes live. My backup will remain on Steem for the short term, while the chain continues to run. On both chains I will be @c0ff33a as an account and a Witness, and on both chains I will continue to work with @derangedvisions supporting our creative, active, photography and unique content creators.

STEEM or HIVE - what should I do?

Like Witness Voting your choice is YOUR CHOICE. Decide your path and follow it, nobody can or should tell anyone what to do in this situation. Read, learn, assess and make an informed decision.

My personal perspective is this, it is not financial advice, and you should choose to do with your investment in Steem as you see fit.

Hive as a fork of the Steem Blockchain is being actioned and backed by pretty much all our existing Top Twenty Witnesses, for me this is the work of people I have respected and believed in for over three years. It also has the backing and support of Witnesses throughout the ranks, the majority of DAPPS and a large amount of third party infrastructure for api nodes. From launch HIVE will have for more supportive Witnesses, api nodes, infrastructure and backup then Steem. The experienced coders that have worked on the last 22 Hard Forks, who know the blockchain code inside out are part of Hive.

Steem has no community developers working on it, the Steemit Inc developers that were purchased have all quit. It is very unlikely they have anyone capable of coding a smooth hard fork, in fact at present without the support of our existing community developers it is highly likely the Steem blockchain will crash completely from any hard fork because there are no experienced coders left working on it.

It is your choice, look at the options and make the decision. I can not tell which blockchain to support, and your investment is your investment you must choose how it is best utilised for you.

Personally I am looking forward to Hive, everyone the is working on it is super focused and they are committed to making it the standard in DPOS Blockchain. If you want to be part of game changing Blockchain, and see a great return on investment then support HIVE.

Last Confirmed Block Number 41,768,846 Last Aslot 41,909,218

Steemd v0.22.4444





Kind thanks to Witness @enginewitty for employing his Ninja graphic design skills and producing this 🔥 banner

If you enjoyed my post don’t forget to leave an Upvote, feel free to comment on what you liked or where I can do better even. Follow @c0ff33a for regular and varied posts, photography, my weekly VLOG, posts on coffee roasting and brewing - just follow and see.

To grow your presence and following on Steemit, be active in the community Discords that offer the chance to learn, network, share and be found. The #TheRamble discord https://discord.gg/HZYzEry hosts a range of shows where you can join in and get your name shown, every Thursday there are two Pimp My Post Thursdays which are hugely popular and give you an opportunity to get your posts seen.

All photos are my own, taken with my iPhone. All my Steem posted pictures can be freely used by other Steem users in their own blog posts - all I ask is that you follow me and credit @c0ff33a linking to my post you took it from. You can also follow me on Twitter

You can view my current Witness Statistics using this tool produced by Witness @justyy

The picture to the right kindly sketched by the wonderful @bridget.art , be sure to check her incredible art out https://steemit.com/@bridget.art

The greatest challenge we face on Steem blockchain is getting our posts seen, I have always believed the simplest and best value way of doing this is by commenting on the blog posts of others, the more you engage people and interact with them the greater the chance they will visit your own blog and return the favour. Other then spending all my free time commenting on Steem blockchain posts, I also distribute coffee roasting machines and also espresso coffee machines and roast my own Speciality Coffee Range. being one of the premium coffee suppliers Yorkshire including a wide range of filter coffee sachets. Finally I have a dedicated website to my Artisan small batch roasted coffee featuring roast and post packs and super easy coffee subscriptions

Proud sponsor with @derangedcontests of @brosino , free to play and cash out Steem rewards, head to Brosino Website now and start playing.

!steemitworldmap 53.766547 lat -1.801500 long Bradford, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. d3scr

This awesome animated Banner has been kindly been created by the wonderful @snook

The Coffee Break Discord Voice Chat Show, in @thealliance Mondays 10pm UTC hosted by @c0ff33a and @enginewitty

Don’t forget to vote for Witnesses https://steemit.com/~witnesses

You can vote for the Witness team c0ff33a and @derangedvisions if you like what we are doing for people and communities throughout the Steem blockchain - click vote for c0ff33a Witness

If you are uncertain about Witnesses and who to vote for you can vote for c0ff33a as your Witness Proxy and you will vote for the same Witnesses as I do.

If you have spare Witness votes, support other active Witnesses like @thekitchenfairy , @enginewitty and @jackmiller
@untersatz

2017 blogging, 2018 Witness, 2019 COFFEEA TOKEN