BEAUTY OF CREATIVITY CONTEST WEEK IV: WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED FROM STEEM- ACCORDING TO MY THOUGHT BY @YOGAGAYO

Steem is used for content delivery on the internet. Its users can make posts and comments and upvote or downvote them. Steem has ongoing token inflation. 65% of all new tokens are distributed to users who make posts and comments or upvote them. 10% of the new tokens are given to so called witnesses who run the servers that are the nodes of the network, 10% of the new tokens are given to accepted proposals to do useful work for the ecosystem via the Steem. DAO system, 15% are given to those who hold Steem Power, which is STEEM converted into an untransferable token that gives a user voting power over rewards, witness elections, and DAO proposals. Upvoters and content creators split the content rewards 50/50. Voting over content rewards is based on ownership of Steem Power, called stake.

Steem is useful for maintaining freedom of speech because it is very hard to delete anything from a blockchain. It requires creating a new chain without the unwanted transaction by replaying ALL the transactions from the point after that transaction occurred. That requires that the chain be brought to a halt. It can take days to replay all the transactions.

Steem is the back end of dozens of useful applications, many of which are used for a niche purpose. For blogging purposes, there are many alternatives to choose from incuding but not limited to steemit.com, busy.org, and steempeak.com. There even exists an application like Quora called Musing that allows its users to be rewarded with the STEEM cryptocurrency for asking and answering questions.

What’s important to understand is that Steem is not a website. Steemit is but one web application that uses the Steem blockchain as its back end (data storage and financial layer).

A blockchain is distributed ledger. A distributed ledger is a shared, replicated and synchronized that has no centralized entity that controls it and that exists on a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Thus a consensus mechanism is needed ensure that each of the copies of the ledger is exactly the same. In a blockchain, entries into the ledger are timestamped and organized into groups called blocks.

The immutability of the ledger is maintained by including into each block a hash of the previous block. Thus the chain of blocks forms an immutable chain, the integrity of which is simple and quick for the participants of the network to check.