ou may have noticed in the menu on the top right of steemit.com an entry that reads "Steemit Whitepaper", and maybe heard people talk about it, and maybe you had a bit of a read, but didn't read much.

So I am going to give you a brief summary of what it says, in simpler language, and maybe you want to read it closer.

Highlights

• Steem's blogging system is intended to both induce continued participation, as well as to help discover and discuss ideas for expanding the network.

• The network is highly structured and separates mining from block creation, which is part of how it achieves such high transaction capacity and regular broadcasts.

• Both mining and block creation are synchronised tightly and this requirement makes it difficult to allow one miner to mine with more than one computer or with high latency connections, to stop botnet mining.

• Witness nodes, who verify transactions and make blocks, have a random schedule of taking turns to make blocks. Everything in the Steem blockchain operates on a very strict scheduling order to minimise jitter in network timing.

• Difficulty adjustments for mining are dynamic and decrease when closing on new token creation deadlines. The difficulty rises only slowly to reduce the ability to gain advantage for faster systems exploiting changes in hash power bursts, somewhat similar to how voting power decreases to limit spamming.

• Use of the network by users is tracked per user to prevent spammy transactions like mass voting, commenting and frequent small denomination transfers (which are otherwise free).

Some of the parameters are changed now, and will change more in a couple of days. I think it would be good if the results, proposed changes, and rationales were added to them.

Steem's blockchain is quite different from most others. I might read some more Whitepepes and discuss differences, comparisons of a few, sometime soon.

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We can't stop here! This is Whale country!

_{oki was born in Australia, now is wandering Amsterdam again after 9 months in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist.}

_{Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration, preferably while living in a beautiful mountain house somewhere with a good woman, and lots of farm animals and gardens, where he can also go hunting and camping.}

<sub>"I'm a thoughtocaster, a conundrummer in a band called Life Puzzler. I've flipped more lids than a monkey in a soup kitchen, of the mind."
- Xavier, Renegade Angel</sub>

_{All images in the above post are either original from me, or taken from Google Image Search, filtered for the right of reuse and modification, and either hotlinked directly, or altered by me}