Crypto Academy Season 3 Beginners' course - Task 1 : STEEM & TRON | By @jaspichman125
Hello professor @sapwood, I am glad to submit my CryproAcademy Homework Post For Task - 1 : STEEM and TRON.
The proof-of-brain (PoB) is a community-based consensus mechanism that is utilised on blockchains like the Steem blockchain to distribute incentives or rewards to authors and curators of contents. It should be noted that, the Blockchain consensus algorithms/mechanism is different from the consensus mechanism upon which communities operates especially on the Steem blockchain.
The PoB is not run by complex machines or computers, rather, by people. The people must have a consensus (agreement) over the integrity, authenticity and validity of a particular content before it will be regarded as quality or meaningful content. This is because, Steem blockchain is a decentralized distributed social media platform. Therefore, the PoB helps the entire community to have agreement over the value of contents produced on the blockchain.
A content is judged as “good”, meaningful or quality content when:-
- It is original and plagiarism free
- It adds value to the community and life in general
- It is informative
- It does not violate any rule guiding the Steem blockchain
- There’s no hate speech, racist connotations, or any form of bigotry.
Contents that obey all the rules are adjudged by the community as quality or meaningful work therefore, they’re entitled to get rewarded from the reward pool (a pool of tokens allocated for incentivising content creators and curators).
The combination of the reward pool, Steem power (SP) holders, and the consensus of the community members makes up what we call the proof-of-brain (PoB).
The PoB is important in a decentralized social media like Steemit because with this mechanism, it is easy to determine the value of contents when the community members reaches a consensus on the quality of the contents.
Curation on the Steemit blockchain is the act of discovering a content, reading through it, determining its value either good or bad, and upvoting it. Curation happens when you upvote and comment on people’s posts on Steemit. Curation indicates how much you earn from upvoting and commenting on other people’s posts. The real post or the comments under the post can be curated.
The person that upvotes contents is known as curator. Whenever you upvote people’s contents, you earn reward in form of Steem Power (SP). The higher your SP, the bigger the value of your upvote, the bigger curation rewards you get.
Curation rewards is usually 25% of the post value. If you curate a content between 0 – 15 minutes after the post was made, reasonable percentage of the reward goes to the author.
If you curate a post at exactly 15 minutes after it was published, 50% of the reward goes to the author and 50% goes to you.
Any upvote made on a post 30 minutes after it was posted, 100% of the reward goes to the curator.
One of the ways Steemit users can earn on the Steem blockchain is by holding STEEM in form of Steem Power (SP). People with huge SP (dolphins - 5, 000 SP to 499,999 SP🐬 and whales 🐋 500, 000 SP - and above ) earn more curation rewards than people with small SP (planktons 1 - 499 SP and minnows - 500 SP to 4999 SP ).
You can build SP by converting liquid STEEM to SP through a process called “power up".
You can also by SP from exchange platforms (it is a bit technical so, it is difficult for newbies and non professionals). You can also build SP through author and curation rewards (50% of the author rewards comes in SP while curation reward is always in SP).
Steem backed dollars or simply steem dollars (SBD) can be exchanged for STEEM then you can power up your STEEM.
Benefits
- Building SP is like buying a stake on the Steem blockchain.
- It makes you an active member in the Steem community building.
- Curation reward are earned in proportion to the amount of SP so, the more you build your SP, the better curation rewards you get.
Building SP increases your influence in terms of voting weight, recognition (as active participant and believer of the project) on the Steemit blockchain.
It helps in boosting follower base. People naturally tend to follow users with high SP. e.g. #StephenKendal And #Cryptokannon.
If you build your SP, you can delegate SP to others.
Having high SP helps in promoting Steem, making it have a better market value thereby convincing others to either buy STEEM or join the Steemit platform.
Building SP not only adds value to you, but also, it helps others (when you curate their contents) as well as the entire ecosystem.
As discussed earlier, curation is one of the ways users earn on Steemit. But there’s a selfish form of curation. It occurs when users decide to upvote their contents rather than allowing people to do so.
Remember, the PoB is a community-based consensus mechanism for determining the value of contents on the Steemit platform. The value of a post entirely depends on the wise judgement of the community members.
When users practice the self-upvote, they violate the PoB principle of allowing the community to judge the integrity, authenticity and validity of their contents thereby casting votes on their contents regardless of whether the content is meaningful or not. This habit is often found in people with high SP because the system is based “the higher the SP, the better the curation rewards”, some selfish profit driven individuals violates the rules by upvoting themselves; this is called self-upvote or more meaningfully, selfish-upvote.
Moreover, the total value of a post is distributed between authors and curators. So, if a user who is the author upvotes his content, he gets both the author and curation rewards which is a bad behavior to the ecosystem.
Self-upvote is bad because of the following reasons:-
- It makes users to be profit driven rather than trying to support or promote meaningful contents with their votes
- It makes those with high SP always get the highest rewards thereby discouraging those with small SP because they get little or nothing.
- It violates the PoB principle
100% of the curation reward goes back to the curator - It discourages hardwork
- Finally, the practice is bad to the ecosystem.
Advice
Rather than upvoting yourself, seek for contents and upvote them. Better still, you can follow curation trails.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/
- According to data on coinmarket.com, as indicated in the infographic above, STEEM token is currently ranked at #183 among other cryptocurrencies.
- STEEM has a coinmarketcap of US $214.323 M
- STEEM all time high (ATH) is US $8.574 which occurred 3 years ago on 3rd January, 2018.
- STEEM token has a total supply of US $404.042 with a daily trading volume of
US $6.78 M
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/steem/
- STEEM is currently trading at US $0.5545 showing a staggering 93.53% decline from the all time high (ATH - $8.574) which occurred 3 years ago.
New tokens are generated on the Bitcoin blockchain during a process called mining. Miners use computers (nodes) with high computation power to solve mathematical problems. Each time such problems or puzzles are solved, it means new blocks are added to the blockchain also new coins are created and the miner is rewarded with some coins.
Unlike Bitcoin, new tokens are created on Steem blockchain by “witnesses" instead of miners. The witnesses are a group consisting of 21 members. They are responsible for creating new coins by adding blocks to the blockchain through a process of validating transactions. The witnesses also govern the affairs of the Blockchain.
Recall that the Steem blockchain is an incentivised blockchain that rewards users for creating and curating contents. As a result, it allocates 65% of the new tokens to the “reward pool”. The reward pool is where the rewards of authors and curators come from. Each content producer and curators gets their rewards in proportion to the value they add to the Steem blockchain.
The different tokens that are earned on Steem blockchain are:-
STEEM: thus is the native currency of the Steem blockchain. It can be transferred to other accounts, it can be ‘powered up’, it can be exchanged for other tokens and it can be sold.
The price of STEEM is influenced by market forces such as demand and supply. The current price as at the time of writing this post is US $0.5545
Steem Power (SP): is a measure or rank that shows how much influence a user has on the Steem blockchain. Influence on the Steem blockchain is always proportional to the amount of SP a user holds.
Unlike STEEM, Steem power is less liquid. STEEM can be converted to SP through a process known as “Power Up". Likewise, SP can be converted to STEEM in a reverse process called “Power Down".
You can build SP through power up or by earning curation rewards which is always in form of SP.
Steem Backed Dollars (SBD) or simply, Steem Dollars: is a stable value currency similar to USDT (a blockchain type of US Dollars) that is pegged to $1 USD. Meaning, 1 SBD = $1 USD
But because of the widespread acceptance and popularity of the SBD on Steem blockchain and other exchange platforms, it’s value has surpassed the $1 = 1 SBD tie. It is currently trading at 1 SBD = $ 8.12 based on data obtained from coingecko.com as at the time of writing this post. It can be transferred, exchanged for other tokens and be sold.
TRONIX (TRX): is the native token of the TRON ecosystem. It was integrated with the Steem blockchain in December 2020. The CEO of TRON, Justin Sun bought Steemit platform 3 years and he succeeded in reaching an agreement with Steem Incorporation to integrate TRON with Steemit.
As a consequence, authors on Steemit platform gets 1 TRX for every 1 SP they earn as author rewards.
Therefore, TRX is one of the tokens people can earn on Steemit blockchain.
The PoB is a community-based consensus mechanism that helps community members to validate the integrity of contents on blockchains like the Steem blockchain.
Curation is a good practice of discovering, reading, wisely judging and upvoting contents on Steemit.
Building SP has tremendous benefits as outlined above.
Self-upvote is a bad practice. It is like cheating. It disrupts the PoB consensus mechanism.
I am optimistic about the future of STEEM based on the data on coinmarketcap.com. I want STEEM to smash the past ATH price value in the next few years and set a record ATH of $50. I want STEEM to have a better market rank in the next few years. Probably a rank among the top 10 coins 🪙
There are several tokens you can earn by socialising on Steem blockchain. Authors and curators of contents earns STEEM, Steem power, Steem Dollars, and TRON.
Thanks for reading through my homework post.
Best regards; @jaspichman125
Hi @jaspichman125 please always have an active post(less than 6 days of age) at Steemit Nursery for receiving the 500 SP support. See you around soon!
Hello @jaspichman125 , I’m glad you participated in the 1st task of the Beginner’s class at the Steemit Crypto Academy. Your grades in this task are as follows:
Recommendation / Feedback:
Thank you for submitting your homework. task 1. We hope to see the rest of your submissions.
Wow. Congratulations to myself!
Thank you Prof for taking the time to read through my homework and grade it.
Best regards
Guy an pressed keep it up
Thanks bro. I'm always grateful to you for introducing me to Steemit.
Best regards!