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RE: Where does the money come from?!
Steem is a cryptocurrency used to bootstrap development and incentivize participation in the Steem platform. A portion (~10% I believe) of the currency's inflation is dedicated to rewarding community members for content and curation contributions. Those rewards are determined by the votes cast by existing Steem stakeholders. People who vote up, or curate, new content that later becomes popular also receive a portion of the post's proceeds, which again, is allocated out of the currency's inflation.
Whereas Bitcoin rewards objective proof of work in the form of computing power, Steem, in part, rewards subjective proof of work in the form content evaluation by the Steem community.
oh ok so Steemit is like the R&D dept of a larger system. So all of this is really intended as a way to gather good ideas for the overarching system? its paid out of pocket from the investing stake-holders because they intend to profit from the other facets of the greater system. (I keep thinking of Ether, is it similar?) but to sift through all the ideas we upvote and downvote eachother to compete for a greater slice of the bounty. So even though someone here might enjoy my posts about sports, pop culture or unicorns and vote for it, it won't bear the same influence as these 'whales' who start themselves out with massive steem aka their investments. But hypothetically, If I wanted to hijack all this I could pay cash for steem and throw approval around at dumb ideas but that would be cash out of my pocket and into theirs which is kind of like paying damages anyways. Am I getting warmer?
It may be a little too much information, but it's all in the whitepaper.
https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf
Steemit is the first company which is pioneering the use of this brilliant public ledger: steem, which stands ready to power a worldwide, censorship free, continuous broadcast of copious information.
Steem power will begin dramatically changing hands on July 4th, and the influence will become more and more distributed from that point forward. This is still in beta... stick around! Keep posting, looking under the hood, kicking the tires... I think you'll like what you see. :)
ya, I'm still sluggin through the white paper. I may have to read it a few times before I get it.
That's exactly right. If you were to buy-in in a big way then you could make all sorts of dumb votes (say upvoting spam) and the money to pay for those posts would come out of your (and other investors') pockets by way of dilution. Or, at the same cost to you, you could choose to vote for good posts that direct your money toward adding to the value of the platform. Most significant stakeholders will likely do the latter—that's the theory anyway.
You would gain some of the money back through the curation share (half the money on a post goes to the author, and half to the people voting. The amount the people voting get is weighted by how much steem power you have).
So your investment in steem power could pay off handily (the power resets after 24 hours of not voting and in theory you could make money indefinitely by voting every 24 hours. This is the whole reason why some people have set up bots to vote.
That's another question I had, couldn't a guy set up a program to just upvote ALL the newest articles as they come out and if they get popular, he gets rich, if not, no skin off his nose... Or does upvoting unpopular things have the potential to drain your steem? If it does than wouldn't people be less likely to flesh out and discuss unpopular ideas like alternative rightwing stuff for instance?
Your voting power decreases when you cast a vote, and recovers over time. When you vote a lot, your vote is worth less and you receive less. You can check your current voting power at https://steemd.com/@paul-labossiere in the table on the left.
Have you read the whitepaper? It might be one of the most economically and intellectually rewarding thing you can do today.
I'm still reading it. I'll have to read it a few times though I think to really get it.