Hey there!

Curie is a curation trail type account. Someone has to submit your post to them, they go through it and decide if it’s good original content. Curie votes are good! It means someone thought your post was awesome and submitted it to that curation project. People follow curie’s curations using Streemian (I think that’s the right thing) and they follow suit with their own votes. Some people have auto vote turned on to vote on whatever Curie votes on, some people manually vote. This is both a way for someone to make a little bit of curation rewards and help boost the curie vote.

Also nothing on Steem is in £. The estimated payout fluctuates A LOT! That is true but I believe that amount is actually represented in SBD, not USD or £s. It MIGHT be USD, but I can’t seem to find a solid answer on that.

When you get paid out the price differences are because they split that amount in half, and use one half to “buy” Steem Power on your behalf, so it goes through that exchange process, and seems like less than it should be, but it’s not. Especially when the price of Steem is up!