One Week Review of SteemIt

Hi all,

Ive been using SteemIt for over a week now and I must say I’m quite impressed by the social media platform. I think SteemIt has potential to make other platforms such as Reddit and other blogging forums obsolete. However, for me to fully invest my time and effort into something, I always ensure I understand what I’m getting myself into and there are some aspects of SteemIt that can be quite confusing therefore I took some time to put together a list of lessons learned in my first week which I’m hoping can benefit all current and future steemians.

Number 1: Steem Rewards

Steem users are rewarded for posting, commenting and voting. Payouts for each post are distributed 7 days after the content is created. Posts generally have two different types of payouts which are Steem Power and Steem Dollars. We will talk about the difference between these later in this post. Payouts for each post or comment are located at the bottom of every post and the ratios for the payout vary based on level of interaction. The payout breakdown consists of the following:

• 75% of the Payout is given to content creators (75% of to the author, and 25% for curators [commenters and voters])

• 15% is shared amongst Steem Power holders – This is shared with Steem users that hold Steem Power. This is how SteemIt is able to provide Steem Power holders with interest on their investment.

• 10% to Steem Witnesses – Steem Witnesses are data nodes that run 24/7 and support all actions processed on the Steem blockchain

Number 2: Voting Power

Do not waste voting power! Every post or comment you uptick costs 2% of your voting power (at 100% vote allocation). It takes roughly 36 minutes to regenerate 0.5% of your voting power… so if you use all your voting power in a couple of couple of days of steeming, it may take upto 5 days (or 7200 minutes) to get it all back. It is important to keep your voting power high so you can have more influence and higher curation rewards

Steemd.com is a great resource to view your voting power. Simply type steemd.com into your URL follow by a forward slash and @ your SteemIt username. For example, mine is steemd.com/@steemlit. Once your profile is pulled up, you will be able to view your voting power and other details such as age of account, total posts, reputation and all social interactions with your account (whose post you commented on, who upvoted your posts/comments and at what voting %)

Number 3: Steem vs. Steem Power vs. Steem Dollar

• Steem is the cryptocurrency bought and sold on exchanges. Steem does not have steem power and does not generate interest. It is simply a currency that can be converted to steem power or used to powerdown your steem power and trade it for bitcoin

• Steem Power is not traded on an exchange. It is valued on a 1-1 ratio with Steem however, Steem Power generates interest and is used for influence.

• Each Steem Dollar (SBD) is worth ~$1USD. Steem Dollars are used to determine how much a user account is worth. Suppose the price for Steem was $1.25, each Steem Dollar would be worth 0.80 of Steem. The value of Steem Dollars and how many Steems it can buy can be found here: http://www.steemdollar.com/

(The variable information shown above is from July 24 – 10:30PM ET)

Other General Questions about SteemIt:

1. How Often is new Steem generated? Every 3 seconds new steem is created in blocks as part of SteemIt’s blockchain. This results in over ~$16K worth of steem created daily

2. What is a blockchain? Via @TeamSteem & Wikipedia: “A blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, secured from tampering and revision. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to a previous block by design, blockchains are inherently resistant to modification of the data — once recorded, the data in a block cannot be altered retroactively.” Currently, over 14 million blocks of SteemIt content have been created which include all posts, comments, upvotes and downvotes created by all SteemIt users.

I hope this was useful to all current and new steemians! Before I go, I want to give a big thanks to @teamsteem. Ive read many of his blogs and asked him several questions all of which he responded too! Much appreciated!

Other sources:

https://steemit.com/money/@stealthtrader/don-t-waste-your-steem-power-like-i-did

https://steemit.com/steemit/@teamsteem/a-bit-about-steemit

https://steemit.com/steem/@teamsteem/steem-an-in-depth-overview

https://steemit.com/witness/@teamsteem/what-are-steem-witnesses-and-why-you-should-support-them