Today I posted on Youtube about the Steem blockchain rewards, I post in order to attract newbies to join Steem, but it may well be helpful to existing Steemians so here it is.

Steemit Rewards: Curation vs. Creation

With Steemit, and the other applications on the Steem blockchain, such as dlive, steepshot, busy, etc. You earn cryptocurrency by either creating content, or identifying, sharing and commenting on great content.

These two means of earning crypto are called: content creation and content curation.

Content Creation:

Creation is self-explanatory, you earn crypto for posting new content on the blockchain that people like.

Content Curation:

Curation is less obvious, it is the process of adding value to the existing content on the network. And you might do this by commenting in a thought provoking manner, about a video you saw on Steemit, or by sharing that video to a broader audience, or even by upvoting that content.

Commenting, sharing, upvoting, other people’s awesome content will earn you part of the reward pool from that content because you are adding to the success of that content.

Additionally, when you comment you are “creating content”, because the comment is itself a piece of content on the blockchain, and that content can itself receive upvotes, which you in turn earn for.

So as you can see you can earn by both having unique and interesting content, and by growing the community, dialogue and conversations around other people’s great content.

Where does the money come from?

Ok, but where do these rewards come from? First of all, the payments come in the form of cryptocurrency, specifically Steem and SBD (Steem Backed Dollars). And these funds are generated daily by the Steem blockchain, as a programmed reward intended to incentivize content on the network.

So when you upvote me for my latest video, you are not giving me your money, you are actually telling the Steem blockchain, “I approve of this content, and in my opinion it is worth a portion of the total daily rewards.”

Since the network places a particular value on you, your reputation and voting power it can ascribe a particular dollar value of the total reward pool to that content, based off your approval.

So as an example, my vote is worth approximately 0.39 cents, which is a bit misleading because again payments are not in USD, but suffice it to say, I can ascribe 0.39 cents worth of cryptocurrency to your recent post, if I like it, and if I upvote it.

Paid by the system, paid a proportional amount of the total “reward pool”, based on the number of upvotes, and the weight of those upvotes.

Another important point is that each day you can upvote 10 items with full power, meaning that if you try to upvote everything you see, your approval will mean less and less until its worth nothing at all. Meaning it is advantageous to be selective with your voting power. This mechanic also prevents people from spamming the network with crap content and just upvoting their own stuff all day, forever.

Curation vs Creation: What is better?

So since you can earn by both creation and curation, which is better?

Depends, if you have a knack for content creation do it, if not you can simply explore the network and enjoy content that others have designed and earn by curation and commenting.

Having said that there is a significant difference in pay out for creation vs curation. Creators get 75% of the total daily reward pool, and curators get 25%.

So if today there was only one post on Steem, and if that post received a $1.00 upvote, then 7 days later that post would pay out 0.75 cents to the creator, and 0.25 cents to the one upvoter (“curator”).

In practice it’s much more complicated because there are in fact thousands of posts each day, and thousands more comments and acts of curation, but suffice it to say, curators stand to claim a proportion of the 25% curator pool, while creators have a chance to claim a proportion of the 75% creation pool.

And as I said above, the payouts occur one week after the post went live.

Conclusion:

That is Steemit rewards in a nutshell, there is more too it and somethings evolve as the network “hard forks”, because remember this is a blockchain and the code can be altered as time goes by, but for the most part that is the basics.

In conclusion, you can earn on Steem in many ways, using a variety of different apps (steepshot, steemit, busy, dlive, partiko, etc), and by either creating new awesome content, or by curating cool content.

It is free to sign up, and you can start anytime.

As I have said before I love the system and I earn daily crypto by using it, and I think you should too. Furthermore, I may be wrong but I believe each token earned today will be vastly more valuable in the future, so I think we are all wise to get involved now, and start earning today.

That is all I have to say today, as always, thank you for your time and attention, have an awesome day, and God bless.