Steem.it is a decentralized social media platform, that allows users to earn revenue for creating and curating content. Investors were taken by surprise with Steem’s 1000% rise to power on the Charts, leaving the young cryptocurrency among the top 5 biggest Market caps in the crypto sphere, along with Bitcoin and Ethereum.
This incredible rise resembles the one seen in the Ethereum currency, Ether. Users may find themselves confused to tune in and find a cryptocurrency they’ve never heard about before in the top 5 market caps in crypto, so Coincheck decided to fill you in.
The Steem.it platform allows anyone to create and curate content, in exchange for monetary reward. When one creates content and posts it on steem, it’s up to other users to review and vote for the content, this process is called curation.
In order to curate content, users who have SteemPower (which can be exchanged for steem 1-1) have to vote for a post that has been recently created. When a curator votes, he will use his steem power and the content creator will receive a reward proportional to the amount of Steem power the curator holds. Curators are encouraged to upvote quality content early, since curating rewards are distributed according to time, in a system in which the curators who voted first get the bigger piece of the reward.
Let’s say I create a post about Coincheck, and I have 10 votes, which gave me a total of 100usd (the amount of usd gained will depend on the amount of steem power voters háve and not on the quantity of upvotes), those 100usd will be divided in two pieces. Half goes to the curators and the other half goes to the content creators in for of Steem dollars and Steem Power (50/50).
Steem Dollars are used to protect users from volatility and can be exchanged for usd worth of steem at any time. Steem Power is used to curate content and can be converted to Steem in a 1-1 scale in a period of 104 weeks. Steem is a Proof of Work and Delegated Proof of Stake currency. This means that Steem can be mined with computational power, but mining is a little different. In Steem, the block reward if sent to a vest fund which is the distributed to miners, content creators, and curators. Steem can also be mined in the Delegated Proof of Stake system: Users can keep Steem Power in their accounts, which will be delegated to pre-selected master nodes that stake the steem power and maintain the blockchain. In this process users benefit from holding steem power, by voting and gaining DPoS rewards. Master node selection is made by a voting process, held in the Steem.it platform.
What we’re left with is a completely decentralized reward system, with no ads whatsoever, which will most likely change the way the internet works. Users will no longer need to monetized their content with ads or referral links, and will instead be rewarded by the quality of their content. Steem.it could be the real Facebook killer.