History::::
On July, 4th, 2016, Steemit, Inc officially launched Steemit, a social media with virtual currency rewards that runs over the Steem blockchain. On July 1, 2016 Steemit announced on their website that they were hacked. The attack, according to them, has compromised about 260 accounts. A little less than US$ 85,000 worth of Steem Dollars and Steem are reported to have been taken by the attackers.[5] On March 15, 2017 Dan resigned as a head of technology and a marketing team was announced with Mitchel Loureiro (
Concept:::::
The Steemit concept was described in the companies white paper, released in March 2016.[6] The general concept is similar to other blogging websites or social news websites like Reddit, but the text content is saved in a blockchain. Using a blockchain enables rewarding comments and posts with secure tokens of value. Images can be uploaded and hosted on Steemit. Other multimedia content must be embedded from other web hosts. For formatting, there is a WYSIWYG editor. Users can also opt to use Markdown formatting with HTML elements.
User accounts can upvote posts and comments, and the authors who get upvoted can receive a monetary reward in a cryptocurrency token named STEEM and US dollar-pegged tokens called Steem Dollars. People are also rewarded for curating (discovering) popular content. Curating involves voting comments and post submissions. Vote strength and curation rewards are influenced by the amount of STEEM Power held by the voter.[4]
Steemit has a reputation system, where new accounts start with a reputation of 25. An account's received votes can influence its reputation up and down, incentivizing online etiquette and interaction with the community.
Usage and media coverage::::::
As of Nov 2017, there are more than 450,000 Steem accounts.[10] After an initial public beta for which no payments were made, the hard fork on July 4th, 2016, saw $1,300,000 of STEEM and Steem Dollars paid out to Steemit users.[11] According to company reports, since October 2017, $30 million were paid out to over 50.000 users.[12]
The exchange rate of STEEM compared to Bitcoin rose continuously during July 2016, peaking at a price of over 4 US dollars.[4] 20th of July 2016, Steem had a first notable peak of market capitalization with about 405 million US dollars.[13] As of December 16th, 2017, its market cap is 525 million US dollars.
Steemit was described as a novel and "disruptive blockchain-based media community" by Adam Hayes (Investopedia) in July 2016.[4] It got media coverage in cryptocurrency- and business-related media.[14][15] Author Neil Strauss, a Steemit member, wrote an article for Rolling Stone calling its reward distribution "particularly clever" and echoing the sentiment of its disruptive potential.[16]
Andrew McMillen explained in Wired Steemit's function being rooted in transparency with every vote and transfer being viewable to the public from upvotes on posts to wallet transfers. Unlike most digital currencies which are difficult to access for the majority of the world without any money to invest, Steem removes the friction for the average person to join in the cryptocurrency world by allowing earnings via posting without needing to buy in first.[12]
Criticism