How Often Should I Upvote and How Should I Store My Steem?

As a new user to Steemit, I finally got around to reading the whitepaper and I highly recommend everyone to sit down and take the time to go through it too. Here are some of the concepts that I found important to know getting started in all this:

Chill out with those upvotes homey, take a break!

Upvoting is a great way to promote the content you enjoy and also to earn some of the rewards from the posts. But did you know that depending on how often you upvote and when you upvote makes a big difference?

As seen in the graph above, the more you upvote, the lower the potential rewards you get for each. Even if you create multiple accounts and split your Steem among them to try and counter this, the same effect will be had - just spread across your accounts. So treat your votes with care, and only give them to the content you find valuable!

NOTE: You can upvote A LOT before this actually becomes an issue. Go to https://steemd.com/@discombobulated (replace with "@yourusernamehere") to view your voting power on the left

Upvote timing can make a HUGE difference

After reading how to properly upvote from the post by @steemship I found out that if you upvote within the first couple minutes of a post coming out, you could only receive 5% of the curation reward with the majority going to the author. But if you wait just a little bit until 15-30 minutes afterwards, you could earn between 50%-100% of the curation reward!

This is a tricky situation though to play with - do you want to accept a smaller reward percentage, but vote before the whales and get a nice piece of that pie? Or do you want to wait a few minutes and aim for maximizing your curation reward percentage?

How should I keep the money I am earning?

For the everyday person, holding onto Steem Dollars is the safest, easiest way. You don't have to worry about huge fluctuations in price, inflation/dilution, and watching the markets everyday to see if you need to buy or sell. This is relatively the safest way to hold value on Steem. Plus you earn interest on holding them too!

STEEM DOLLARS

Stability is an important feature of successful global economies. Without stability, individuals across the world could not have low cognitive costs while engaging in commerce and savings. Because stability is an important feature of successful economies, Steem Dollars were designed as an attempt to bring stability to the world of cryptocurrency and to the individuals who use the Steem network.

The actual mechanics behind how this works are a little tricky and require a level of economic understanding. But for the everyday blogger, all you have to know is that Steem Dollars are eventually going to trend around $1SD to $1USD and will stay around that valuation.

STEEM

STEEM is the fundamental unit of account on the Steem blockchain. All other tokens derive their value from the value of STEEM. Generally speaking STEEM should be help for short periods of time when liquidity is needed.

Someone who holds STEEM without converting it to Steem Power is diluted by approximately 0.19% per day.

For Bloggers, you only really need to think of STEEM as your "middle-man" currency when trying to buy-in or cash-out to the system. If you do hold STEEM, only do so for a few days at most as the dilution will begin to eat away its value.

STEEM POWER

Because Steem wants to encourage long-term growth, it is hardwired to allocate 9 STEEM to Steem Power stakeholders for every 1 STEEM it creates to fund growth contribution incentives. Over time this drives the ratio of the total STEEM value of Steem Power balances to the total of STEEM balances toward 9:1. (It seems likely that the ratio will be somewhat greater than 9:1 due to continued net Powering Up of the newly printed STEEM.) It also means that long-term holders are almost completely protected from the dilution used to fund growth.

SP can only be converted back to STEEM over 2 years via 104 equal weekly payments.

Essentially, Steem Power is a way to be a long-term investor in the Steem project. If you are bullish on the technology and see bright things for our future, this is the way to go. But remember that you need to go through a two year process to be able to get those funds back!

Good luck everyone and remember to Keep it Steemy