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RE: The Great Steem Debate: Berwick VS Sovryn - Steem Discussed for Hours on National Radio!
It works the same way Bitcoin pays miners to secure the network --- seignorage of tokens combined with their market value, which is based on speculation
Not exactly. The Bitcoin protocol allows a miner to create a coinbase reward for solving a block. That takes a lot of work, hence proof of work. When I upvote someone and hence, give them steem power, I did no work what so ever. I think THAT is the different twist that has people concerned. I literally give value out of thin air, no work required.
For someone to write or up-vote a post there IS work required. Subjective work (e.g. content curation, AKA up-voting, and creativity) is work too. Steem supports rewards for subjective and objective work, and from a blockchain perspective, the token supply operations are analogous.
I still use this explanation and it seems to work really well on newcomers that already know a little about bitcoin. It's super short and easy to understand. It's just prize money in a blogging competition instead of in a math problem-solving competition.
The Bitcoin blockchain gives coins to those that calculated a hash. The Steem blockchain gives coins to those that wrote an article. Both is work.