History and concept of Steemit

History of steemit

On July, 4th, 2016, Steemit, Inc officially launched Steemit, a social media with virtual currency rewards that runs over the Steem blockchain. On March 15, 2017 Dan resigned as a head of technology and a marketing team was announced with Mitchel Loureiro (@zuvarnic) and @andrachy. Frank Rimalovski, Andrew Haines and William Mougayar (@wmougayar) are advisory board members while @cass, Jeffrey Paul (@sneak), James Calfee (@jamesc) and Valentine Zavgorodnev (@val-a) are a few of the staff members.

Concept of steemit

The idea was described in a whitepaper released in March 2016 [4] which was updated in August 2017.[5]

The general concept is similar to other blogging websites or social news websites like Reddit, but the text content is saved in a blockchain. Using a blockchain enables rewarding comments and posts with secure tokens of value. Images can be uploaded and hosted on Steemit. Other multimedia content must be embedded from other web hosts. For formatting, there is a WYSIWYG editor. Users can also opt to use Markdown formatting with HTML elements.

User accounts can upvote posts and comments, and the authors who get upvoted can receive a monetary reward in a cryptocurrency token named STEEM and US dollar-pegged tokens called Steem Dollars. People are also rewarded for curating (discovering) popular content. Curating involves voting comments and post submissions. Vote strength and curation rewards are influenced by the amount of STEEM Power held by the voter.[3]

Steemit has a reputation system, where new accounts start with a reputation of 25. An account's received votes can influence its reputation up and down, incentivizing online etiquette and interaction with the community.

Monetary system Edit

The Steem blockchain has two tokens: STEEM and Steem Dollars. There is also a vested or stored interest known as Steem Power. Steem Power is strictly for internal use in the Steem community, while the tokens are used for stored value and trading.

Steem began with a highly inflationary supply model, doubling roughly every year.[3] However, due to community demand, on December 6, 2016 the inflation rate of Steem was changed to 9.5% per year, reducing by 0.5% per year.[6]

Usage and media coverage Edit

As of Nov 2017, there are more than 450,000 Steem accounts.[7] After an initial public beta for which no payments were made, the hard fork on July 4th, 2016, saw $1,300,000 of STEEM and Steem Dollars paid out to Steemit users.[8]

The exchange rate of STEEM compared to Bitcoin rose continuously during July 2016, peaking at a price of over 4 US dollars.[3] 20th of July 2016, Steem had a first notable peak of market capitalization with about 405 million US dollars.[9] As of December 16th, 2017, its market cap is 525 million US dollars.

Steemit was described as a novel and "disruptive blockchain-based media community" by Adam Hayes (Investopedia) in July 2016.[3] It got media coverage in cryptocurrency- and business-related media.[10][11] Author Neil Strauss, a Steemit member, wrote an article for Rolling Stone calling its reward distribution "particularly clever" and echoing the sentiment of its disruptive potential.[12]

Andrew McMillen explained in Wired Steemit's function being rooted in transparency with every vote and transfer being viewable to the public from upvotes on posts to wallet transfers. Unlike most digital currencies which are difficult to access for the majority of the world without any money to invest, Steem removes the friction for the average person to join in the cryptocurrency world by allowing earnings via posting without needing to buy in first. [13]

As of November, 2017, YouTuber and syndicated radio and television talk show host David Pakman started publishing content from The David Pakman Show to Steemit