What are brownies.pts ?

Brownies.pts (Brownies points) are the coins of a currency created by Dan Larimer ( Dantheman ) at the time when he was building BitShares 2.0 and Graphene the, the technology behind it (same tech as Steemit).

< Newbie paragraph > Who is Dan Larimer, Aka Dantheman (pseudonym in Steem), aka ByteMaster (pseudonym in BTS forum) ? Well, it's the chief ingenieur, in other words, the big brain behind the creation of BitShares and recently Steem. < /Newbie paragraph >

Curious about the whole story ? Have a look at this post from its father. https://steemit.com/bitshares/@stan/the-origin-of-bitshares-rides-again

What is the purpose of this currency ?

The currency symbolises the gratitude of Dan for the BitShares shareholders that helped him to build and promote the Blockchain. He has been offering these coins to reward anyone contributing by helping with the code, translating content, building websites and even being present at the weekly Beyond BitCoin hangouts (hosted by the talented Fuzzy !)

Here you can see the annoucement and the 33 forum pages of rewards attributed to the community : https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=17354.0

Where can I find them ?

They have been created and traded in the Decentralised Exchange of BitShares.
Here they are : https://bitshares.openledger.info/#/market/BROWNIE.PTS_BTS

You can see the supply is 9,400,00 token and they have been traded everyday since their creation.

They have recently gained some value, maybe due to the success of Steem, maybe just market random volatility, maybe soemone knows something that I don't ... who knows ?

The Brownies.pts market cap is, at the time of this writting, is worth 235,000$ ( 9,400,000 x 5 BTS x 0.005$ )
It doesn't sound much when compared to Ethereum or Steem market caps but we are talking here about a currency price supported only on the trust its shareholders have for Dan Larimer.

Now that Dan has moved most of its focus on Steem, why people are not selling all these Brownies.pts ?"

I'm not in the mind of each shareholder but I can try to guess the reasons !

The first one is kind of simple. Would you sell the very own currency of Steve Jobs if he would have personally give it to you and told you "some day, I'll use them to reward these first supporters who beleived in me" ? What if it would have be Bill Gates ? Elon Musk ? Satoshi Nakamoto ?
If you believe in its vision, you don't really care about the short term volatility, you just hold them because you had the privilege to receive them from the (Byte) Master. Maybe some day he will do something with its Brownies.PTS ... If he doesn't, well, you would have at least the thrill during these years to wonder "what could happen ?" Anyway, if you were part of the community and contributed to the project, you have probably received them for free !

The second reason is that Brownies points have been use has a target for Sharedrop in the past.
I guess you are aware PEERPLAYS is sharedroppping 5% of its share on the BTS holders ? You don't ? You don't even know what is a sharedrop ? Check this out quickly : https://steemit.com/peerplays/@peerplays/announcement-bts-snapshot-date
9,400,000 is not a lot of tokens, at 5 BTS each, you can quickly buy a very wealthy capital in Brownies.PTS and have massive sharedrop when it happens.

When is the next one ?

I don't knowm , maybe never ... All I know is that PEERPLAYS is shardropping on BTS and there is a future project called Identabit that would sharedrop half on BTS and half on Brownies. I didn't hear a lot of the last one lately, I'm not 100% sure the project is still moving on.
BTS will be a more usual target for future shardroppping but we never know !

Anyway, this is the two main reason why people are holding their Brownies.PTS.
Now you know something else about Dan Larimer, about BitShares and its shareholders.

I wish you a great day, full of life, joy and nice readings on the Steemit platform. Enjoy !

Yours sincerely, @GlitterFart