In this serie of posts I want to explain the most common things on Steem(it) for new Steemians to help them to be able to quickly adapt the most common things on Steemit. With this I hope newcomers won't be overwhelmed with information and leave early... Steemit is about engagement for the longer term, and the more people are on the platform, the more we can help and learn from eachother.

Steem

I quoted a piece of the Steem Whitepaper.

"Steem is a block chain database that supports community building and social interaction with crypto currency rewards. Steem combines concepts from social media with lessons learned from building crypto currencies and their communities. An important key to inspiring participation in any community, currency or free market economy is a fair accounting system that consistently reflects each person’s contribution. Steem is the first crypto currency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward an unbounded number of individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.”

So what this quote literally says is that Steem is designed to offer a community or social platform where people participating getting rewarded themselves instead of the owners of a platform like Facebook or Instagram. Those rewards can be given for the content or contribution the make to the platform or by curating other peoples content.

Steem, Steem Power (SP) and Steem Back Dollar (SBD)

STEEM
Steem is the fundamental unit of account on the Steem blockchain. All other tokens derive their value from the value of STEEM. STEEM is a liquid currency, and therefore can be bought or sold on exchanges, as well as transferred to other users as a form of payment.

Steem Power
Start-up companies require long-term capital commitment. Those who invest their money in a startup expect to wait years before they can sell their shares and realize their profits. Without long-term commitment, a start-up seeking to raise additional capital through the sale of additional shares would be competing with existing shareholders looking to exit. Steem wants to build a community that is mostly owned and entirely controlled by those with a long-term perspective. Users are able to commit their STEEM to a thirteen-week vesting schedule, providing them with additional benefits within the platform. STEEM that has been committed to a thirteen-week vesting schedule is called Steem Power (SP). SP balances are non-transferable and non-divisible except via the automatically recurring conversion requests. This means that SP cannot be easily traded on cryptocurrency exchanges. When users vote on content, their influence over the distribution of the rewards pool is directly proportional to the amount of SP that they have. Users with more SP have more influence on the distribution of rewards. This means that SP is an access token that grants its holders exclusive powers within the Steem platform. SP holders also earn new tokens based on the balance of SP that remains vested. SP holders are paid 15% of the yearly inflation. The amount of new tokens they receive is directly proportional to the amount of SP they hold relative to the total amount of vested SP across all users. 7 Transferring from STEEM to SP is referred to as “powering up,” while transferring from SP to STEEM is referred to as “powering down.” SP that is powered down is returned to the user over a period of thirteen weeks, via 13 equal weekly payments, starting one week after the power down is initiated.

Steem Dollars
Steem Dollars are created by a mechanism similar to convertible notes, which are often used to fund startups. In the start-up world, convertible notes are short-term debt instruments that can be converted to ownership at a rate determined in the future, typically during a future funding round. A blockchain-based token can be viewed as ownership in the community, whereas a convertible note can be viewed as a debt denominated in any other commodity or currency. The terms of the convertible note allow the holder to convert to the backing token with minimum notice at the fair market price of the token. Creating tokenconvertible dollars enables blockchains to grow their network effect while maximizing the return for token holders. Steem Dollars are denoted by the symbol SBD, an acronym for Steem Blockchain Dollars. Creating SBD requires a combination of a reliable price feed and rules to prevent abuse.

Voting & Rewards

With voting you have two types of votes

• Upvotes
  These are the votes you can compare with the like of Facebook.
• Downvotes
  These are votes you can give if you are against the content of a post for whatever what reason.

Posts (thus people) can get rewarded on Steem by receiving votes. These votes represents a certain value. This value is based on the amount of SteemPower (SP) a person has. The higher the amount of SteemPower the more influence a person has on the steem platform, the higher a reward from that vote is.

Steemian 1	Steemian 2
Someone with 750 SP	Someone with 120.000 SP

As you can see in the example when somebody with 750 SP gives you a full upvote (full = 100%) you receive a reward of 0.06 cents while you receive an upvote of 11.77 when someone with 120.000 SP upvotes you. Of course for somebody with 120.000 SP it is quite rare to give 100% upvotes. I’ll talk more about the votingpower and percentages in a bit.

So in the example you see that someone with a lot of votingpower has much more influence on the rewarding on the platform. That's of course also one of the reasons they have mostly a big following ;) (and of course because of their content)

Votingpower

When you start and haven't give any vote yet you have 100% voting power. Your power decreases with each vote. Voting frequently in a small amounst of time increases the rate at which voting power decays and it recovers slowly after a period of not voting. Standard on the Steemit website you can only give 100% votes until you have 500 SP or more. So on Steemit your votingpower can decrease quite quick. When you have 500 SP or more you get a slider so you can vote a certain percentage (lower then 100%)...

that way you can upvote more without draining your votingpower. It's smart to let your votingpower not go below the 70%, otherwise your upvotes aren't much of a reward anymore :) Some people say that 80% is the bottom, but my (own) rule is about 70%.

Rewards
There are two types of rewards, author rewards and curation reward.
Author rewards are the rewards you recieve for your own posts. So you are they author.
Curation rewards are rewards which are divided among the people who upvoted and commented your post.

in this example you can see that from the total of the post 43 cents is for the author and 3 cents for curation. The key for divding among the people for the curation is something I will exaplain in the next post...

In my next post I will talk more about posting, tools and other interesting things for the beginning Steemian

To be continued.....

Have a great day

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Proud member of SMG

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I fully support @s3rg3 and @exyle, who are witness with their developer group @blockbrothers for the Steem blockchain. If you want to support them, they would appreciate your vote here.


They are the creators of Steemify, THE notification app for your Steemit account for IOS.

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