Content provides the value to the Steemit social media platform. It is most similar to the water that circulates through a conventional steam power plant. Vaporized into steam one day, more content appears instantly. Content is ever present, always changing, and capable of reuse and regeneration as content creators contribute fresh ideas with new written blog posts, videos, photographs, art, music, and more.
The Blockchain drives everything, like the great pump at a conventional power plant. Spinning out new blocks, generating new data that grows continually, it verifies and enables transactions and posting information. Content can be posted, more currency can be created, and people can get paid. This beast never sleeps.
How To Buy STEEM & STEEM Power
Steem Power (SP) operates like a concentrating force. Like a boiler, it superheats the content and creates steam. Oops, I misspelled that; I meant STEEM! When you earn rewards for posting and voting, part of this is paid to you in SP. When you Power Up, you are increasing your SP also. Congratulations, you are becoming a virtual Class A shareholder with your bucketful of shiny tokens. SP gives you stronger voting influence. It also gives you a virtual stake in the future growth of Steemit and the Steem economy, since most of the new currency tokens created are paid out to SP holders. Where does the real muscle come from? From your hard work, of course. Creating and curating content makes it all start to bubble happily.
Steem Dollars are the price-stable currency tokens that represent about $1 each in value. You will get paid partly in Steem Dollars (SD or SBD). There are so many possibilities with SD. You can spend these in the virtual economy which is soon to come, you can hold them and accumulate a 10% return, or you can sell or transfer them into Steem, Bitcoin, or other currencies. Like the turbine that’s spun by steam power in a conventional steam power plant, SD bridge the raw power of Steemit with the real world applications of a price stable currency.
STEEM is the liquid currency, much as electricity is the final product from a conventional steam power plant. You can transfer it, spend it, or Power Up into SP. Passing through this generator is the final step before the product of all your hard work is realized. Through bridges, gateways, merchants, and exchanges, your STEEM plugs right into the online economy. When the market cap of STEEM goes up, you are paid more for bringing your STEEM to the market, just as if wholesale electricity rates had gone up and a conventional power plant operator cashed in by selling it back to the customers on the grid. The
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(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.
(SP)"
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 startup seeking to raise additional capital through the sale of additional shares would be competing with existing shareholders looking to exit. Savvy investors want their capital contributions to grow the company, but growth cannot happen if the new capital is given away to those looking to exit.
There is significant value to having long-term commitment because it enables communities to make long-term plans. Long term commitment of stakeholders also causes them to vote for long-term growth rather than short-term pumps.
In the cryptocurrency space, speculators jump from cryptocurrency to cryptocurrency based mostly on which one is expected to have short-term growth. 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. has been committed to a thirteen week vesting schedule is called Steem Power (SP). SP balances are non-transferrable 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 are also paid interest on the balance of SP that remains vested. 15% of the yearly inflation is paid to SP holders as interest. The amount of the interest that they receive is directly proportional to the amount of SP they hold relative to the total amount of vested SP across all users.
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
weeks, via 13 equal weekly payments, starting one week after the power down is initiated.
(SBD)
Stability is an important feature of successful global economies. Without stability, individuals across the world could not have low cognitive costs while engaging in commerce and savings. Because stability is an important feature of successful economies, Steem Dollars were designed as an attempt to bring stability to the world of cryptocurrency and to the individuals who use the Steem network.
Steem Dollars are created by a mechanism similar to convertible notes, which are often used to fund startups. In the startup 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 a minimum notice at the fair market price of the token. Creating token-convertible-dollars enables blockchains to grow their network effect while maximizing the return for token holders.
Steem Dollars are referred to with the symbol SBD, an acronym for Steem Blockchain Dollars. Creating SBD requires a combination of a reliable price feed, and rules to prevent abuse. Providing a reliable price feed involves three factors: minimizing the impact of an incorrect feed, maximizing the cost of producing an incorrect feed, and minimizing the importance of timing.
Minimizing Fraudulent Feeds
SP holders elect individuals, called witnesses, to publish price feeds. The elected witnesses are presumably trusted by those who have a vested interest in the quality of the feed. By paying those who are elected, Steem creates market competition to earn the right to produce feeds. The more the feed producers are paid the more they have to lose by publishing false information.
Given a set of trusted and elected feed producers, the actual price used for conversions can be derived as the median of the feeds. In this way if any minority of individual feed producers produce outliers they have minimal impact on the actual median while still having the ability impact their reputation.
Even if all feed producers are honest, it is possible for the majority of feed producers to be impacted by events beyond their control. The Steem network is designed to tolerate short-term corruption of the median price feed while the community actively works to correct the issue. One example of an issue that may take some time to correct is short-term market manipulation. Market manipulation is difficult and expensive to maintain for long periods of time. Another example would be the failure of a centralized exchange or the corruption of the data published by the exchange.
Steem factors out short-term price fluctuations by using the median price over a period of three and a half days. The median published feed is sampled every hour on the hour.
Voting on Distribution of Currency
Assume there is a fixed amount of money to distribute, and that those who have a long-term vested interest in the future value and utility of the currency are the ones who must decide how to allocate it. Every vesting user casts their votes on who did the best work and at the end of the day the available money for that day is divided proportional to the votes such that everyone with even one net positive vote gets something.
The naive voting process creates a N-Person Prisoner’s Dilemma5 whereby each individual voter has incentive to vote for themselves at the expense of the larger community goal. If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no currency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect. On the other hand, if only one voter defects then that voter would win undeserved profits while having minimal effect on the overall value of the currency.
Voting Abuse
Regardless of how much money any one individual has, there are always many other individuals with similar wealth. Even the wealthiest individual rarely has much more than the next couple wealthiest combined. Furthermore, those who have a large investment in a community also have the most to lose by attempting to game the voting system for themselves. It would be like the CEO of a company deciding to stop paying salaries so he could pocket all of the profits. Everyone would leave to work for other companies and the company would become worthless, leaving the CEO bankrupt rather than wealthy.
Fortunately, any work that is getting a large concentration of votes is also gaining the most scrutiny (publicity). Through the addition of negative-voting it is possible for many smaller stakeholders to nullify the voting power of collusive groups or defecting large stakeholders. Furthermore, large-stakeholders have more to lose if the currency falls in value due to abuse than they might gain by voting for themselves. In fact, honest large stakeholders are likely to be more effective by policing abuse and using negative voting than they would be by voting for smaller contributions.
The use of negative-voting to keep people from abusing the system leverages the crab mentality that many people have when it is perceived that one individual is profiting at the expense of everyone else. While crab mentality normally refers to short-sighted people keeping good people down, it is also what allows good people to keep bad people down. The only “problem” with crab mentality is when people wrongly believe someone is profiting at everyone else's expense.
5 N-Person Prisoner’s Dilemma
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/npd.html