Wow this is truly amazing. Been here for few months but I can tell that I have more understanding with this. Wow... Now I know that Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and was launched on January 3 2009. Also gotten to know that Steem is a cryptocurrency and social network which reward its users for the content they create.
Then, due to its decentralized nature Steem can't be censored or tampered with by any central authority. I was made tobunderstand that Steemit is a social news service which runs a blogging and social networking website on top of the blockchain database, known as Steem and that the project was founded in 2016 by Ned Scott and Dan Larimer, @ned and @dan respectively. These are truly amazing personalities.
I've also gotten to know that a cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange using cryptography to secure the transactions and to control the creation of additional units of the currency.
Blockchains are "an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. Each cryptocurrencies have their own blockchain. There exist more than 300 cryptocurrencies. Steem witnesses are computers or nodes run by some Steemians and these computers run the Steem open source software.
The content reward pool is often referred to simply as the "reward pool".
Steemians are paid for each upvote they cast. This is called curation reward. This is 25% of the content reward pool. Each vote and downvote lower voting power by 0.5%. Interesting.