Steemit was founded in early 2016 by Ned Scottand Daniel Larimer.
Having worked together before, they met for a discussion in January 2016 and found that they shared a common vision for an online social economy. The social media portion of this, Steemit, is just the beginning. In the future, we hope it can be combined with other blockchain-based features, organizations, and third party apps, all geared towards improving peoples’ lives in measurable ways.
Ned Scott is Steemit’s CEO. Based in New York City, he has a background in financial services and business operations. Over the last few years, he had been investing in the Bitcoin space and sharing its opportunities with Wall Street investors. After becoming interested in cryptocurrency, Scott approached Daniel Larimer about creating a blockchain-based social media site that would allow community members to create a mutual aid society. They soon decided that they could accomplish much more than this with Steemit.
Larimer, Steemit’s CTO, is a programmer based in Virginia. He has been involved in cryptocurrencies since the early days of Bitcoin. He one of the few living people to have exchanged messages on Bitcoin’s public forum with Satoshi Nakamoto, the legendary and elusive creator of Bitcoin. Larimer famously told Satoshi that Bitcoin was not fast enough, which seems to have foreshadowed his achievements.
Larimer went on to found BitShares, one of the most innovative Cryptocurrency 2.0 projects. BitShares attracted a team of talented programmers, working under the label of Cryptonomex, who improved upon Bitcoin’s blockchain technology by creating the ultra-powerful Graphene toolkit that now powers Steemit. It enables lightning-fast transactions and instant payments withextremely tight security. BitShares also has enjoyed a large and heavily involved community of users who helped create, test, and refine its decentralized exchange.
When Scott and Larimer began work on Steemit, they already had an expert technical team and they also had an active community of users from BitShares, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrency projects. They did not have to spend time recruiting and training a new group of programmers, though others have joined the project. Having a ready-made community of supporters and an active user base is almost unheard of for a startup. Many companies buy smaller competitors just to acquire a user base, but Steemit already had a foundation of people who could test the site and begin to share it across the Internet.
From there, the growth has come quickly and steadily, yet it is only just beginning. As we writethis, Reddit has about 38 million users, Twitter 300 million, and Facebook 1 billion. They offergimmicks such as karma points and likes and meaningless upvotes, but none of them pay users. Steemit should continue to grow as fast as word-of-mouth can spread it. Since the four coauthors of this book began using Steemit in the spring of 2016, it already has grown by many thousands of users, and we believe that is only the beginning.
Why does this growth matter to you? Because Steemit will still be a young site for a while. It has lots of room for growth and you have the power to get in early. The more reward tokens you build up in Steemit, the more you effectively will have a stake in future growth. And your stake can grow proportionately along with Steemit until you decide to cash it out in price-stable currency tokens that are worth about $1 each and can be converted to Bitcoin or other currencies. You will gain a much better understanding of Steemit’s financial aspects in the coming chapters.