CRYPTOACADEMY INTRODUCTORY TASK 1/STEEM AND TRON BLOCKCHAIN/BY. @SAPWOOD

*CRYPTOACADEMY BEGINNER TASK EXPECTATION: question category 1.

(1) What is PoB?

What does curation mean to you in Steem Blockchain?

What are the benefits of building SP?

How do you explain self-upvote as a good or bad social behavior & why?

Explore Coinmarketcap.com to indicate rank, STEEM price, and coinmarketcap of STEEM(screenshot required)?

What are the different tokens you do earn by socializing in Steem Blockchain?

INTRODUCTION

Steemit is a social media site for content creators and curators, built on steem Blockchain. It follows the pattern of Facebook in it's social nature, where users give comments and likes on posts; it also has the nature of reddit in that users determine valuable content by upvoting it to a trending post.

Steemit is equally a platform for processing digital currencies, with it's main coin steem. Steemit has other coins like the steem dollars SBD, and steem power. With the merging of Tron and steem, users on steem can also receive trx as rewards for their works on the steem Blockchain.

According to steemit blue paper, the steemit platform is designed to serve the dual purpose of both a social platform and cryptocurrency platform in which users irregardless of their area of interest stands to benefit.

It was founded on July 4th, 2016 by Ned Scott co-founder, CEO and Dan Larimer, co-founder and the Blockchain developer. Among the purpose of steemit is to correct the many deficiencies of centralized social media systems.

Take for example, aside from social interactions, do you actually profit by making use of centralized social media platform? Your guess is as good as mine! The centralized social platform instead sell your data as feeds to advertisers and keep the profits all to themselves. However in decentralized social platform like steemit, you are in charge of your personal data, and more to that you can monetize your activities.

How you benefit

• As a content creator, you can monetize your content when people upvote you.
• As a user or curator, you can earn reward by voting on a content that you like.
• As an investor, you can profit by investing in the native coin.

Skeptics has often asked : what do you actually do on steemit? How do you make money? Well, let's answer few questions by taking a look at the consensus mechanism of the steemit Blockchain POB. Also, what do we mean by curation? How do we benefit by building sp? And why do we advise against self upvote?

These questions forms a part of the cryptoacademy beginner introductory task requirement.* see full list above.

WHAT IS POB?
POB is an acronym for "proof of brain." It is a consensus mechanism that is human-focused instead of machines. In proof of work consensus algorithm POW for example, miners earn block rewards when they have given proof of their work by using highly efficient computer equipments to solve mathematical puzzles that will make the Blockchain secure, validate transactions and bundle the records of those transactions into what we know as blocks. Such process requires huge amount of money to invest on equipments and also pay for electricity.

Steem equally has miners, but the consensus algorithm employed defer from proof of work. New coins are mined at a fixed rate after every 3 seconds. The miners do not only take the profits but the proceeds are distributed among the miners, known as witnesses, taking 10 %; the developers, those working on the dapps, taking 10%; Investors, those who staked their coin, taking 15% and the rest 65% goes to the content creators and curators. The sharing formula gives greater concentration on proof of brain.

Proof of brain focuses on human wit instead of machines. A user gives proof of brain by involving his wisdom in either creating or *curating contents and thus is rewarded by such actions.

Steem combines proof of brain and delegated proof of Stake Dpos consensus algorithm. While I will not go deep into delegated proof of Stake, which can be a subject for another post; it is important to note that a user's stake in the platform determines how much reward he can either distribute or redistribute. The higher a user's stake by holding high amount of steem power (SP) the higher he can distribute and redistribute and vice versa. This is known as a stake-weighted mechanism. A curator by voting on a post distributes the steem coin as an appreciate for benefiting from the post and the amount of coin he could give is determined by the staking power he has.

What proof of brain means to you as a content creator.
It means that you need to be original, giving proof of your wisdom in producing contents. When a content is copied from another, it doesn't give proof of brain but rather plagiarism and this goes against the very aim of the consensus mechanism.

When your content impacts favourable on others, they will appreciate you by upvoting your content and the amount you could make from a post is proportional to the weight of your voters.

What proof of brain means to you as a curator
A curator will appreciate a post based on the value it adds to him or the community at large. It means that your brain will be involved in going through and determining the value of a content by judging it as valuable and the scale of such. You will therefore be rewarded for your actions.

When a curator upvotes a post simply based on sentiments rather than on merit, it goes against the idea of proof of brain.

2

WHAT DOES CURATION MEAN TO YOU IN STEEMIT?

We have discussed what proof of brain means for a curator in the preceding chapter; now let's talk about curation proper.

Put simply, curation in steemit involves the work of reading through a post to determine it's value. It may take a form as serious as vetting an article or it can just be a read through for enjoyment purposes. In what ever form, provided the article added value to either the reader or the community, the reader chooses to do the following:
1: upvote it. By upvote you are distributing a coin to the author as an appreciation for his work and this is dependent on your voting power or the weight of the vote you give to the individual.
2: resteem it. By resteeming an article, you make it more popular and trending.
3: comment. Add your voice or an appreciation.

At other times, someone may just commit the horrible sin of plagiarism; it is the job of a curator to spot out such bad player and report his work to the community.

All the actions focused on discovering a good content is known as curation in steemit.

3

WHAT ARE THE BENEFIT OF BUILDING SP?
We have hinted that a curator's vote is largely influenced by the number of steem power he has. It means the higher the steem power we hold the higher our voting weight and vice versa.

It equally means same for a content creator; the number of steem power you hold determines the value in amount of the coin that can be distributed to you. Take for example, a user with 125 sp who scored 10/10 in steemit academy will not get same amount of vote with another user who has same score but with 500 Sp.

So building up our steem power benefits both a curator and an author.

4

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN SELF UPVOTE, AS GOOD OR BAD SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND WHY?

We have already shown what proof of brain means for both the content creator and curator. However, users in steemit has the capability of becoming both. Creating a work adds value; curating a work adds to the social nature of the platform and equally adds value to the platform.

However when you curate and upvote your own content, you become like a judge who sat down and pronounced himself best without allowing others to do the judging. More to that, in steemit, it is a bad social behavior for some reasons.

• It doesn't encourage good content discovery.
  Should everyone vote themselves, it will result that a user can write anything and upvote oneself irregardless of the content having value or not. This will simple work against the proof of brain consensus mechanism. A user with high steem power may write almost nothing but yet he will upvote himself.
• The platform will be contaminated with plagiarized content. Anybody can just copy and still upvote oneself.
• It do not encourage fair distribution of coin. Coin distribution may revolve around the few with high steem power.

These issues are why some are of the opinion that steemit should ban self upvote in it's entirety. While a user should not be deprived of the right to vote on content, he need to exercise restraint on self upvote so as not to undermine the core values of steemit platform.

5

EXPLORE COINMARKETCAP.COM TO INDICATE RANK, STEEM PRICE AND STEEM MARKET CAP OR STEEM.
Let's see the image below.
Fig 1. Coinmarketcap.com

Image source

As at today 26 August 2021, steem price is $0.6028

The Market Cap is
$233,214,890
And the coin is ranked 182

6
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TOKENS YOU DO EARN BY SOCIALIZING IN STEEMIT.
There are three tokens to be earned, one among all is "steem" earned in the form of steem power. The steem power are automatically powered up. The second is Steem dollar, known as SBD. And lastly Trx, from Tron Blockchain.

CONCLUSION.

In this article, we have discussed steemit's proof of brain, curation in steemit, SP and wrongness of self upvote.

We are very much exited to work on steemit platform. There are high hopes for the steemit community. As Blockchains receives more and more adoption we hope that steemit will out beat and unseat it's many rivals in the social blogging sphere.

My very speculation is that steemit could rise to be the first Blockchain based search engine. While the view is subjective, steemit is taking a toll in that direction with the birth of steemit cryptoacademy. If the platform develops programs like this in other niches other than crypto, then such hope could be closer than just an imaginary.

@sapwood
@awesononso