I’m very new to Steemit. What caught my attention was it rocketing to the No. 3 on Coinmarketcap.com. It’s been on my radar as one of the crypto projects I need to research, but unfortunately I didn’t get to it till after its meteoric rise.
Bitcoin has proven that money can be created out of nothing. We’ve known this for a while as that’s exactly what the Federal Reserve and other central banks do. Bitcoin also proved you don’t need the authority of a gov’t to issue money that has value. How Bitcoin relates to Steemit, is anyone can create money from nothing to incentivize any type of behavior. That's what Bitcoin miners. They expend real resources (electricity, computational power) to generate tokens created from nothing. These tokens only have value because other miners and Bitcoin users collectively decided they have value.
What is revolutionary about Steemit is they’ve figured out a way to give away content for free and monetize it to compensate its creators without advertising, affiliate links, selling, or gathering personal data of its users. How? They create the money, out of nothing to compensate contributors; just like new Bitcoins are created from nothing for miners, Steemit creates new money, STEEMS, for posts, up votes, comments, etc. But what does the STEEM money buy you? It buys influence on the SteemIt platform. The more “STEEM power” you own, the more influence and weight your up vote carries on the platform. You can also sell this influence for Bitcoins, which you can convert to USD or any fiat currency.
For many years, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. have extracted billions of dollars from user generated content through advertising and selling user’s personal data, without sharing any of that value with the users that created that content. SteemIt has shown it is possible to compensate users who create, curate, and comment on content without advertising, selling private information, or selling by simply issuing new money. That alone is a big idea.