EXPLANATION ON HOW STEEM TOKEN IS MINTED, DISTRIBUTED AND POST PAYOUT SHARED- DETAILS HERE 👇

Hello friends, how are you doing today? I know we are all doing fine. Thank God, it is another Friday. I am rest assured we all are looking forward to having an enjoyable weekend.

The steemit platform provides an opportunity for us to learn. We acquire knowledge from reading through the post of colleagues. Many at times, when we are promoting steemit to prospects and explaining it to newbies, there are questions that often reverberates in peoples mind, that is "Where does the steem token the curators and authors are rewarded with come from and how is it distributed and shared?".

This is a timely question which many steemians still seek to address. Let us remember that the steemit platform is the first dapp built on the steem blockchain and uses the native token steem for its rewards.

In the steem blockchain, these new token are mined as a result of completed blocks formed in the blockchain. Any time a block is produced, new tokens are formed.Most of the new token mined are sent to a reward pool which houses the newly minted tokens. From this reward pool, the users who engage in creating original and quality content as well as curators are rewarded.

These new tokens are created at a yearly inflation rate of 9.5%. This yearly inflation will be reducing at the rate of 0.01% for every 250,000 blocks created. This reduction will continue until it gets to 0.95%. At which time it is expected that almost all the total supply of steem would have been minted. This will take about 20.5years which will land us to 2037 considering that the hard fork was applied in 2016.

The new tokens minted are distributed in the following proportion:

Sn	Recipient	% of newly minted token received
1	Reward pool(shared by curators and authors	65%
2	Steem power holders	15%
3	Steem proposal system	10%
4	witnesses for running the blockchain	10%

The post payout are shared 50-50 between the authors and the curators. This implies that 50% of the post payout goes to the author while the remaining 50% goes to the curator.

For the curators, the reward gotten may be higher or lower depending on the amount of voting activity. If the voter curates a content between 0 and 5 minutes of making the publication, he will not earn all the curation rewards. 60% of his curation reward will be donated back to the reward pool. This will be discussed fully in my next write up. Also if a curator votes on a post after 5 minutes before a whale votes on that publication the reward will be higher. However, it is good to note that votes are weighted. This means that the higher the steem power a curator have, the more percentage rewards he will earn from the reward pool but his votes will not increase the rewards in the reward pool.

Rewards are claimed by going to our wallet, signing in with our active key and clicking on the claim button to claim the rewards or when it appears on your profile page, you click on redeem.

These are illustrated in the screenshots below.

	when claiming rewards on the profile page
	when claiming rewards from the wallet page.

The rewards in steem can be paid in three crypto currencies which is embedded on the steem blockchain. They are

● Steem, which is the native token of the steem blockchain. This is very liquid as it can can transferred to other accounts or even exchanges, traded on the steem blockchains internal market for steem dollars or be powered to become steem power.

● Steem Power, this is also steem but earned directly as powered up steem. This steem power, determines the influence a user have in the ecosystem. The higher the SP an individual have, the more vote value he can give and the more curator reward he can also earn. To use it like steem, you will need to power it down, which takes 4 weeks. Each week, 25% of the steem power drops to liquid steem which can be used by the individual. By the end of the 4 weeks all the steem power would have been converted to liquid steem.

● Steem Blockchain Dollar(SBD), this is a stable coin of the steem blockchain which is pegged to the dollar currency. 1 SBD is equal to 1 USD. The SBD is also liquid and can be traded in some crypto exchanges. There is also provision of exchanging SBD for steem in the internal market.

A user can actually decide how he wants his earnings to be. The three options are

◇ The user can decide to decline all his payout, in this case, the rewards goes back to the reward pool.

◇ The user can decide that the payout should be 50% SBD and 50% SP

◇ The user can decide if the payout should be 100% SP

The settings for this can be seen below the posting screen where you have advanced setting*. Kindly see the screenshot below.

	click on advanced settings
	by default, the payout is on 50% SBD and 50% SP, we can change the settings by clicking on the drop down arrow by the right.
	click on the one we want and the payout setting would be changed.

I believe that we have learned a lot from this write up. We have been able to explain where and how the steem token earned as rewards are generated. We have also been able to explain how the newly minted token is distributed and the pool from which the rewards are shared. I have also explained how the payout is shared amongst the authors and curators, what we can do to earn more curation rewards.

We can now understand and explain the various currencies that can be earned and how to set it while making a post.

Thank you all for going through, I know this can help us and our newbies to learn more in the steemit ecosystem.