Understanding how Steem operates

Producing a new block
To create blocks over the Steem blockchain, a consensus mechanism is known as Delegated Proof of Stake (DPOS). This system uses witnesses instead of miners that help produce blocks. The witnesses essentially represent a group of people who own the block-creating accounts.

All the users who have Steem accounts can then vote and elect, on consensus, the witnesses. A single account holder has around 30 witnesses for future purposes. This shows the close-knit operations at the Steem blockchain as the community collectively elects about 20 witnesses alongside backup witnesses.

All these witnesses are responsible for looking after the network’s block producers and governance body, which must be done every 3 seconds. For every block that these witnesses create they Steem Power fairly pays and compensates them.

The reward system
Steem’s reward system is particularly systematic and unique to its competition. The rewards are distributed among Steem users responsible for producing or curating content, those who participate in content discussions, and the users who vote on the content.

Steem also further distributes the 75% yearly inflation as rewards amongst all the contributing users. The basis of distributing the rewards is mainly dependant on the voting patterns; however, a large majority of the rewards are distributed amongst the users who have engaged the popular mainstream content.

The new coins generated during the block creation are also shared amongst the users. This again goes out to show the close-knit community of the Steem blockchain in how they operate. The BTC(Bitcoin) is almost wholly allocated to miners once the new coins are created in block creation. From this percentage, witnesses get a 10% of the new STEEM coins while the content creators, producers, etc., get the other 90%.