Explaining Steemit and the Blockchain in a steemit meetup,Uganda
Last week me and my friends in Uganda organized a meet up to dicsuss about Steemit and the blockchain revolution which is steadily breaking records globally and gaining ground in Uganda.
In this we had recruited a few novinces and some of the questions we answered were, what is steemit,steem dollars etc ? And how it differs from the blockchain? What are the benefits and the risks of adopting this technology at the individual.
The meeting included @jaraumoses .First to be discussed off the table were the definitions.And steemit in simple terms is a social network that pays any individual for commenting,liking and writing posts.Steem dollars is a crypto currency, which is not the same thing as electronic money or mobile money.Steem dollar is adigital currency in the same league as a US dollar of a Ugandan shilling.It is not different from Bitcoin or any other popular digital currency.
It is not legal in our country Uganda,but that doesn’t mean you cannot get it or participating on the social network.Infact it was not blocked.A few years back the central bank of Uganda banned the use of any digital currency in the economy, and in the shoes of the central bank,there are several reasons I would ban the currency.It makes the economy unstable because of the falls and abrupt rise .The currency cannot be controlled by anyone because no one owns it.It is being minted online and is spreading like a wild bush fire.
Worse still this form of currency has no central agency to run to in case a customer is swindled.
The blockchain was designed that is powering this crypto was designed not to have a central trust because computers don’t make errors like humans do say the Federal reserve.Errors are pre emptied when the blockchain is designed.Only validated transactions are allowed by a computer participating.
How the Steemit Blockchain works
All accounts on steemit and posts are mathematically connected and built on top of previously posts forming a continuous chain of trusted blocks of transactions hence the term Blockchain. The fact that open, mathematical consensus rather than through closed, centralised agencies that are often prone to manipulation or compromise.
Blockchain Vs the Federal Reserve
Blockchain that is powering Bitcoin, is by design not supposed to have any centralised trust agency to run to in case of disputes. This is because disputes are pre-empted and not allowed to occur in the first place through computing protocols.
Only validated and trustworthy transactions are processed while fraudulent transactions are automatically rejected. The trust is therefore in-built within the protocol, which is being executed by a global network of participating computers.