Steemit Currencies
Steemit consists of three currencies that make up the Steemit economy; steem, steem power, and steem dollars. Let’s explore those currencies.
Steem
Steemit has its own blockchain that issues the steem (STEEM) token. The steem token is the fundamental unit of accounts on the Steem blockchain. The token can be used inside the Steemit economy to boost accounts’ steem power, or it can be traded for steem dollars (SBD). The steem token can be traded on public exchanges like Bittrex or Binance. So, steem is the highly liquid component of the asset system. Steem power and steem dollars derive their value from the value of steem.
Steem Power
Steem power is basically locked steem and is meant to be a fixed, long-term asset. Because of this vesting action, your steem is converted to steem power. This process is called ‘Power Up’.
The reversed action of ‘Power Down’ is as well possible. The strength of the whole Steemit ecosystem depends on this. It’s is only possible to Power Down 1/104th of your steem power weekly. In fact, after two years you have converted a full steem power back to steem.
A lot of people hold Steem Power. The more Steem Power a user holds, the more influence they have in the Steem network. This means that their upvotes and comments are more worth than people who have locked up less Steem Power. It’s as well beneficial for the users themselves as they receive higher curation rewards for upvoting posts.
In addition, the amount of Steem doubles every year (100% annual inflation). 90% of this new Steem is distributed over all Steem Power holders.
Steem Dollar
The steem dollar (SBD) was designed as an attempt to bring stability to the world of cryptocurrency and to the individuals who use the Steem network. The steem dollar is meant to be worth roughly $1 USD. A steem dollar is transferable/convertible debt that you can transfer to an exchange or sell to someone else. It’s basically a promise to pay one dollar’s worth of steem when you decide to redeem it. For a business, it’s more comfortably to accept a steem dollar that will have nearly the same value each day.
Steem dollars are earned by publishing content on the Steemit platform. An author will receive both steem power and steem dollars for adding content to the platform. An author can define the percentage of each, with 50% as a minimum for Steem Power.
A steem dollar can be redeemed at any time when its price goes lower than $1 USD. You will receive steem coins that are worth $1 USD. The steem dollar you give back to the Steemit economy will be destroyed. As there are less steem dollars circulating, the price of steem dollar will increase back to $1 USD. It’s a very clever way to maintain a stable token price using your Steemit community. This whole process takes 3.5 days.
Steem Dollar is not perfect. In December 2017, the price reached $12 USD.
How does Steemit reward its users?
Steem is earned through Proof of Brain. It’s all about writing down quality content that people like. Bots are not yet able to produce great articles by themselves. Writing quality content proves you are human. There are two ways of earning your steem.
Author Rewards: When you publish content on Steemit like a blog post or a comment and you receive upvotes for it, you will receive author rewards.
Curation Rewards: In case you upvote a great post or comment, you get rewarded a share of the value of your upvote as curation reward.
Watch out, all content you publish is stored forever on the Steemit blockchain and cannot be altered. For Steemit, this immutability means total freedom from censorship. The decentralized voting system makes sure people can upvote quality post so others can find this valuable information as well.
So, users are incentivized to create great content by rewarding them with steem tokens.
“A lot of chat traffic is going on in the Steemit slack of accounts being hacked,” one Steemit user wrote in a post earlier today. “Maybe It’s time for my newest proposal. Two factor authentication! I think that with a simple configuration of the Google Authenticator app you can secure your account a whole lot better!”
Mind was supposed to be the new social platform.
It is not, it is simply a platform for publishing articles.
In use it is dreadful, like something out of the digital Stone Age.
I tried posting a couple of articles, then gave up, it was so bad.
Anyone else tried Mind?
Steemit would have greater credibility if it gave away faircoin not bitcoin.
It's not that I can simply search "mind".
Steemit runs on Steems I think, not Bitcoin.
But why do you think Faircoin gives more credibility than Bitcoin? I find this ridiculous. Faircoin is nearly unknown, like 99% of altcoins. Bitcoin is the only one that is on the verge of entering the mainstream.
Last thing, you can immediately convert Steems into Bitcoin just by opening an account in Poloniex.
However, I think that Steem will soon switch to Bitcoin as a currency. Steems are falling and falling in value to Bitcoin, essentially because they are not necessary. People earning Steems, immediately exchange them for Bitcoin, and poof: value drops, because nobody wants to hold Steems.
he value of Steem is not falling because people exchange them to BTC. The value of Steem is falling because Steemit as a platform and business model does not work.
The non crypto centralised versions have failed that pays fiat currency and everyone accepts that. The only selling point Steemit has is it is decentralised running on block chain technology which has no appeal whatsoever to vast majority of people who won't even understand what that means.
Even if they change to Bitcoin without a change in business model it will not attracts users. And it is the users that will give a cryptocurrency or fiat based platform value.
Where does Steemit even earn the money to pay for posts if there is no external revenue?
Now the price of Steem has dropped to its real value after the pump excitement phase and is constantly falling, as paying people pennies or less for poor posts will lead to people losing interest very quickly, since the majority of people only joined during the artificial pump to make some money posting poor content for the most part.
These models have not worked with the centralized fiat currency versions, which used advertising revenue to pay people to post, so how do you ever think it would work with a crypto version that does not even have external revenue to pay people, but has to constantly produce new coins to do so. And let's not forget Steem would only gain value through demand, but why would anyone want to invest in Steem or even use Steemit?