How to CLAIM REWARDS and Power Up your steem account.
It seems not many have figured this out for themselves, so here is a short guide to claiming rewards and using the SBD:SP market to increase the power of your account. Your account power determines the weight of your votes and your bandwidth allocation/regeneration so this is important!
In terms of steem power, a new steem account will usually look like this:
this is one of you, with unclaimed rewards
The 0 value is actual power...
The (+15) is a temporary delegation from steemit inc.
This is why the account is listed as having $0.00 value.
But their account has more than $0 value!
This is a problem of not claiming rewards:
A button for this can be found in the wallet:
After rewards are claimed you may also have 'Steem Dollars'
These do not affect your voting weight but can be used to buy steem.
Usually, 1 Steem Dollar is worth at least $1 or more in steem:
To trade into SP, you do not need to use external crypto exchange.
There is a market located in dropdown menu for Steem Dollars:
Clicking into the market you will see this page:
From here you can create orders to buy/sell steem.
Clicking on a price in the sell orders will drop it into the box,
then typing the amount of SBD/Steem will allow buy/sell.
If the amount is across current orders range, it will happen immediately:
Once you have steem tokens from the market, you can Power Up:
Clicking this will open a new window to type the amount to use.
After typing an amount the button unlocks:
Shortly after you will have a message in wallet log:
Once this is done, the steem is locked into your account for at least 1 month, as powerdowns are done 25% at a time, 1 week at a time. Locking your steem into place for some amount of time is the only real downside of powerups, but if you were planning to leave it there anyway then this is what you should do, to gain more RC bandwidth regeneration, increase your vote strength to give others higher rewards, and gain more curation rewards from voting. The more you powerup, the closer you are to having my vote strength, instead of '0.001' like some of you still have.
The reverse of most of this is also possible, and you could decide that instead of powerups you prefer to learn about external crypto exchanges and send steem there, but at low values this may not seem worth the effort to you, and in either case knowing about the wallet/market will be useful.
So what is the biggest reason to power up?
Your voting power regenerates over time.
Regeneration allows for 10 max-strength votes per day,
and once you have enough steem power your votes have real impact:
Does this make sense now?
^_^
LOL
The simplified non-guide version is that no amount of unclaimed rewards will ever increase someones voting power, and idle steem dollars laying around from post payouts or comments can be used to gain even more power.
Since curation rewards are also scaled to power, there is good reason to increase power even while being selfish and ignoring aspects of increasing other people's rewards, but as we are building an echo-chamber it is important to also understand the exponential growth partly relies on people not becoming a black hole for votes.
It costs nothing except some regenerating mana to vote, and with enough steem power your votes begin to have more significant value. At high enough steem power you can vote 50+ times a day and still have value. The payout created by your votes is also not taken from your account - it is given from the blockchain's generated reward pool, delegated across the sum of all votes and their weight, but without ever increasing power a person's vote will always have the tiny dust values of 0.001 instead of having some actual impact. It would take 1000 new accounts to match even one of my max strength votes, and that is before I do any magic. However, this picture is quite different if they know how to increase their power.
I wonder if this whole steemit thing would be an effective thing to bring up in an argument when I'm trying to convince people of the evils of capitalism.
"So you say capitalism causes innovation and the creation of valuable products, but what about steemit, which provides negative value by taking up your time on crypto-nonsense instead of just being a normal forum"
+1 for auto-claim void powers.
The claim rewards button is not something for you to use a lot of time on, so if someone has been here for 20+ days and still has unclaimed rewards it is safe to assume they simply do not know how the system works. Likewise the market takes very little time to interact with, and there is room for strategy and gamification of every system at play, so from the perspective of wasting time on this: no it is not an effective argument at all.
If negativity is your target then you would be better to focus on the fact that this place was never even meant to be used as a gaming forum and is (currently) missing certain features as a result, rather than to focus on our ability to summon cryptocurrency from thin air and reward everyone simply for participating in the community.
However, in the long term the community should become more self-sufficient in terms of voting power, rather than being so heavily reliant on entities such as myself. For this to happen, at least a few people need to have gained some basic understanding of the system, but if there are people that have not understood the function of claim rewards it implies the floor is low and probably not many have reached the level of understanding basic functionality. This is an obvious problem, so I created this guide - to allow some exposure to the basic systems as foundation for a much stronger future understanding that will inevitably strengthen the community's overall grasp of more advanced topics. Not everyone needs to be advanced, but some basic understanding would be good to have around.
If someone does not know how to claim rewards or use the wallet, they also cannot do many other things so they are likely just missing some information, but if someone abstains from claiming rewards simply for not wanting them, then they're missing the point entirely.
Not claiming / Not voting
Beyond the point of misunderstandings these become fundamentally selfish behaviors.
Claiming reward isn't just about your own account it affects the people you upvote as well.
It is fine to be selfish, but I prefer to rule out misunderstandings.
Little scenario:
Random player X happens to hear about / find CEO. He has to - try it, like it, continue playing it, farm inside game, have enough interest / time to even look for forums, create account here, get enough satisfaction / value out of using forum. These are still "layers" placed on top of each other, if / when he loses interest or doesn't find all the involved requirements worth the fun in either of them, all layers above fall.
And now, he has to care / bother / invest more time to understand that the thing he joined as game forum is something more, and try to understand it all, earn, and make the best effort to make others earn, or else we call him selfish. It's quite a way from "hey, little chess-like game for you to have fun at times".
I do understand there is value, and your intentions being helpfull, but assuming / requiring people to invest time and even care about all of the things that you know and find valuable could also be viewed as a bit of ... hm, let's not jump to conclusions from either side :) .
On the other hand, I did use "redeem rewards" for 1st time now, but past that, it only makes me wonder if doing my best to earn is done on forum of a game, on which I waste so much time :) .
I see your point, but it appears that the word selfish has derailed you.
RP trading is selfish - as are many other things, but this is not the problem.
The real problem is that certain people may aspire to having greater power here without having been given any information on how that works or any fundamentals to build from. Nobody is required to do this, but considering it is so easy and comes alongside many benefits, noticing that many of you have not claimed rewards leads to the reasonable conclusion that most people simply do not have adequate information pertaining to these systems. There are people within the community that may want to see it grow, but do not have the knowledge required to make that happen.
What someone does with this information is their own choice, just as it is with anything else, but if they are not given that information to begin with the blame falls to me because I happen to know more about this place than nearly anyone - so it would be quite silly for this community to be filled with people that don't even know the basics.
example:
personX was having a bandwidth limitation problem preventing certain actions, which is caused by not having enough steem power to match their high activity - personX also has never once claimed rewards, even though it would solve said RC problem. This is an obvious lack of information or complete misunderstanding of the underlying system, and no amount of debating, nitpicking, semantics, hypotheticals, or belittlement could ever convince me otherwise. This guide is for the people that need it.
side note:
Ryan and v-56 both have accounts created by Grand with autoclaiming, which means the first person to respond here with a normal account also had never claimed rewards.
This post has received a 58.04 % upvote from @boomerang.