Is it feasible to make money writing articles? -- Steemit, the most misunderstood case in the blockchain world

What will blockchain bring to content .
Write on the front page of the Steemit blog: "great writing: your ideas are valuable. Join the community of people who receive rewards for publishing articles."It USES the blockchain economic logic to spur content creation on the Internet and is probably the most widely accepted blockchain application yet available to ordinary consumers directly
It may reveal how the blockchain economic system will revolutionize digital content.

Overview:

I. Steem public chain and Steemit design an exquisite system

Second, the Steemit blog platform can be regarded as the first application in the blockchain world

Third, this prototype system may bring a lot of inspirations to the application of blockchain economy to content

Steemit is a content writing platform emerging due to blockchain technology, and it integrates with blockchain:
It has attracted many people from the blockchain community to write and communicate on the platform, forming by far the most widely accepted blockchain application that ordinary consumers can directly use.

It now has nearly a million users, generates about 200,000 new articles a day and votes from 600,000 to 700,000. On March 10, it generated 201,768 new articles, and users voted 640,175 times for articles.

Analogy method to illustrate the position of Steemit are available, and in 2016-2017, especially AlphaGo go robot of artificial intelligence, unmanned and content of arithmetic recommended hot spots, but the average consumer can directly use the artificial intelligence application is apple iPhoneX mobile face recognition, this is the face recognition technology comprehensive application in consumer products
Steemit and the public chain Steem behind it are one of the main public chains with the most active trading volume in the blockchain world up to now. However, since its token Steem did not surge sharply at the end of 2017, it has been ranked 27 in the cryptodigital currency market so far without public attention.

But this is probably the most overlooked public and blockchain application. Recently, various factors have led us to pay more attention to Steemit:

Reference to the copy of Steemit or the block chain project to be modified, such as the currency recently launched. The more copies, the more we are interested in the principle of Steemit, a blockchain project.

The whole industry of blockchain is looking for applications that can be truly implemented and application scenarios that can be directly used by consumers. It is one of the most feasible ways to reward highly digitized content creation with blockchain economic model. As we noted in our previous analysis, "the higher the number, the more likely".

The Steemit blog platform and Steem public chain have been launched for a long time, and have formed rich communities and tools. There are enough materials for people who want to deeply analyze blockchain technology. To the technologist, all the related technical tools can be run, tested and redeveloped directly, which is a "knock-on toy".

With the in-depth study of Steem public chain and Steemit blog platform, kuaizhi block chain will focus on the use of blockchain technology and blockchain economy to reward content contributors for multiple discussions. This paper is the first discussion.

We call Steemit's economic system an exquisite system. The word similar to "exquisite" is actually that it is "complex". It is not as simple and easy to understand as the design of bitcoin and ethereum.

Special statement: this analysis only analyzes blockchain technology and economic application according to "Steem" white paper, blue paper and Steemit website description. It is only for industrial discussion and does not constitute any investment proposal.

Part 1: application scenarios

Why do people write on the Internet?

People have been trying to answer this question since the Internet began to develop.

Whatever the answer, people are just happy to write on the Internet. And, every generation of technological change, is taking it as the initial touchstone, digital content is the forefront of Internet innovation, is the greenhouse of innovation, this time the blockchain revolution, one of the most likely changes may also be in digital content.

In terms of content alone, we have experienced:

Personal website;

BBS (BBS);

Web portals;

Personal blogs;

Social networks;

Wikipedia;

Technology blog sites;

Vertical media and professional media;

Social questions such as Quora and zhihu;

Twitter, weibo;

Medium, short book;

WeChat public number;

Since the media;

Today's headlines;

Pay for knowledge, etc.

A content innovation model may have three focuses:

How to promote content producers to write articles?

How to read: how to find better content?

How can content producers be financially rewarded?

The WeChat public account, the most successful content innovation product in the world in recent years, well answers three questions:

It chose the long article content, and with the aim of lowering the threshold of long article writing and publishing;

Its subscription mechanism and social distribution drive the circulation of excellent articles.

It forms effective economic incentives.

The great development of China's we-media ecology is precisely because WeChat public account enables writers to get cash income from e-commerce guidance and advertising marketing, and the model of "knowledge payment" has been added in recent years.

As an experimental product in the blockchain world, Steemit designs a minimum viable product (MVP), which verifies the feasibility of "adopting similar economic incentives" to promote content creation. That is, it mainly verifies the third article of the content innovation model.

It validates that viable solutions can be found in this digital content area, with the open community of blockchain technology and the token economy system of blockchain economy.

The current number of Steemit users, the number of posts, the community activity level of Steem public chain and the stability of the token Steem price prove that the above two are feasible.

Next, let's look at the solutions it provides.

Part 2: the solution

The solution provided by Steemit consists of two parts:

A public chain: Steem, and its cryptocurrency system;

One application: Steemit, the blog platform is the first application of Steem public chain.

Among them, the Steem public chain is specially designed for text content, and the text version of the article can be stored in distributed blockchain ledger/database.
The Steemit white paper was first published in March 2016, and on July 4, 2016, Steemit formally released.

In December 2016, after the 16th hard fork, the token distribution mechanism of Steem blockchain entered the current normal state. According to the total amount of the original token, the token increased by 9.5% annually (and decreased by 0.5% annually). 75% of the new tokens that come out each year are used as bonus rewards for content contributors.

Although it claims to be social media, it doesn't actually have a clear social relationship, focusing on the introduction of money-like incentives into writing content

On the Steemit platform, you will earn a monetary return in the form of cryptocurrency by writing excellent articles.

It USES a simple and straightforward system design, consisting of two parts:

First, article creators and those who find excellent articles will get "money" in return.

Second, the way to determine reward, which content is "good", is to get users to vote on content.

In social media terms, that is, people who create and curation are rewarded, which is what Steemit values content contributors. Steemit provides two corresponding systems:

One, an economic incentive pool based on cryptodigital currency, which is part of the economic system of Steem blockchain;

Second, a voting system for content, which is a key part of the Steemit blog platform.

Since the whole system promotes and rewards content creation, corresponding to the workload Proof of bitcoin, Steem white paper also called the system Proof of brainpower.

Unlike other public chains, the Steem public chain includes four digital currency systems specially designed for digital content, of which the first three are used in Steemit, and the fourth is erc-20 standard similar to ethereum, which will be launched in 2018 and will allow others to issue tokens based on the Steem public chain. Its four tokens are:

STEEM token is the basic token of STEEM blockchain.

Steem Power (SP). STEEM token holders can convert their tokens to STEEM Power (SP). SP needs to be held for a long time, and the withdrawal will take at least 13 weeks. SP can be likened to equity in a company, giving voting rights to bonus distributions and receiving long-term incentives similar to dividend returns.

Steem Dollars (SBD) is a stable token in the Steem public chain, thus allowing it to form a pricing mechanism of Steem tokens within its own blockchain, without relying on external exchanges like other tokens. SBD is also analogous to the convertible note that venture capital firms invest in startups.

Ethereum erc-20 token issuance standard Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) will go live in 2018

In the Steemit blog platform, content contributors receive token bonuses based on the number of shares voted by SP holders (i.e. shareholders).

If you choose to accept the bonus, the content contributor gets half of the sp-form tokens and half of the sbd-form tokens (see chart).

Although many people believe that writing on Steemit gives them "cash" equivalent to the us dollar and SBD is directly linked to the us dollar, we believe that:

It may be more appropriate to think of Steem/Steemit as a completely separate "parallel world" that issues its own currency and rewards content contributors in those three currencies.

It is pegged to the dollar only to make it easier for those of us who still live in the physical and digital worlds to understand.

This is a consistent economic system for people who live in parallel worlds only. Those who are still converting the currency of the parallel world into their own familiar legal tender are still tourists and have yet to settle down as immigrants.

From this standpoint, it will be easier for us to understand the significance of the virtual economy system designed by Steemit.

Otherwise, we would struggle. If we think of it as a company that doesn't have users paying for it or generating distributable advertising revenue, where does the bonus come from?

Viewed as a separate virtual economy, these bonuses are issued by the system's "central bank". Please think about this question again and again:

"Steemit", the money used to reward content contributors, from where?
Dan Larimer: reinventing blockchain

The main developer of Steem public chain and application Steemit is Dan Larimer (also known as "BM" on the Internet), a great god in the field of blockchain.

He is probably the most important blockchain developer after satoshi nakamoto, the founder of ethereum, Vitalik Buterin. Technical leaders of BM's three public chain projects: BitShares (BitShares), Steemit and the most popular next generation blockchain public chain EOS project. He is the designer Of Graphene and DPOS (Delegated proof-of-stake mechanisms) blockchain tools. BM left Steem in mid-2017 to participate in creating EOS as a CTO.

Part 3: technical features

The application of Steem public chain and Steemit has many features in technology, such as graphene blockchain tool and ChainBase, DPOS consensus mechanism, account system, token security mechanism, AppBase, etc. We will conduct special analysis later.

Kuaichi blockchain magic quadrant with project reviews
From the above analysis, we can see that Steem public chain and Steemit blog platform are a combination. Steem is a block chain dedicated to content stimulation. Steemit is the first application example on this public chain.

So far in the blockchain world, this combination is probably the only working blockchain infrastructure platform and application with a huge number of users and usage, including a lot of experience and lessons. It is extremely valuable because it provides the tools for development, as well as a hands-on environment for developers to experiment with.

We can also understand the EOS that BM is developing, which will be launched on the main network in June: BM is not satisfied that Steem is a public chain dedicated to the publishing and motivation of text content, but tries to challenge the development of a more general blockchain at the early stage of the development of blockchain technology. Therefore, the comparison of Steemit and EOS design can also enhance the understanding of blockchain technology and economy and improve the ability of designing blockchain application program.