Last night Pieter, the guy over at Hive account@dewallenband and Hive account@dse, and myself attended one of our good childhood friends 23rd birthday party with about 6 of our other close friends. Inevitably Steemit popped up as a discussion topic since Pieter and myself have been talking about it a lot lately when we are in the company of our friends. A lot of skeptical questions popped up which we had a pretty hard time explaining to our friends. Pieter has a lot more experience and knowledge when it comes to the crypto world so he tackled most of the questions with me in the background adding my 2 cents to the answer every now and then. I've decided to reach out to you guys to help me convey the inner workings of Steemit to my friends in a way that doesn't make Steemit sound like some dodgy-too-good-to-be-true-scheme. Keep in mind that the majority of people in our circle have zero to very little experience and knowledge regarding cryptos. Here are some of the questions that popped up:

1. Where does the money come from?

This was probably the toughest question we had to deal with. I'm still a little unsure myself. Where does the money which is distributed on Steemit come from? I signed up for free and now I'm making real money without having to invest any money or do any physical work for my money? This question is especially hard to answer without it seeming too good to be true.

2. What is crypto mining?

The most basic answer to this question that I could find was that you(your computer) is rewarded for solving computational problems. This question can also get a little tricky when you have to go into detail with people who are not familiar with hash functions.

3. What's the role of a witness?

One of the answers I've gotten to this question was that the role of the witnesses is to run the servers which the STEEM blockchain reside on. Is there any incentive to become a witness and what is the difference between a witness and a miner?

4. What backs cryptos?

We all know that fiat currency is backed by the government and some time ago it was backed by either gold or silver. So what backs cyptos?

5. Isn't cryptos only used for illegal stuff?

This was one of the easier questions to answer since some well known online marketplaces such as Amazon and Steam have started to accept Bitcoin allowing it to step out of the dark corners of the deep web which initially caused it to be known as the currency of criminals.

I invite you all to help me answer some of these questions where there are uncertainty and to come up with an easy to understand analogy to explain Steemit to newcomers.