Steem was The First Blockchain Technology I studied

In mid-October 2018 I completed my first three months on Steemit. Other than a very pedestrian contact with the crypto world around 2013, I haven’t had the opportunity to get into the nitty-gritty of anything related to blockchain technology and crypto-coins.

Due to that, my first days on Steemit were overwhelming. First off, because my ignorance of blockchain technology in general and of Steemit in particular. To remedy this, I gathered a list of a few posts that helped me, I’m will share them in the second part of this post.

What happened to me was that, when I was accepted into the platform, I wanted to write about cryptos/blockchain, but it’s not a subject to approach lightly, like you could approach any other topic.

I will start with Steemit and write about it for a while. Only when my knowledge of the platform becomes solid I will get down to useful posts on other subjects in general as related to Steemit.

I think that it’s fit for me to approach my content strategy on Steemit this way. It’s appropriate, because Steemit, being the starting point in my personal blockchain journey, deserves a showing of appreciation from me.

It isn’t the fact that registration and onboarding took time and evaluation. Or that I want to flatter the community to get something in return. To write about Steemit, is a question of not feeling like it’s a fit to publish content here. And to reach that confidence, I must learn everything I can about the platform first.

Anyway, since I had this notes from before, I’m sharing them, and letting a plethora of other newbie-related content I curated for the second post (and last) part of this article.

This is a summary copied almost verbatim from my notes on both of STEEM’s technical papers. This isn’t meant as a substitute to reading both papers yourself and taking your own takeaways. It’s just my take. Hopefully it will be of use to others.

Takeaways from the White Paper

STEEM is a liquid currency, and therefore can be bought or sold on exchanges, as well as transferred to other users as a form of payment.

STEEM Power

When users vote on content, their influence over the distribution of the rewards pool is directly proportional to the amount of SP that they have. This means that SP is an access token that grants its holders exclusive powers within the Steem platform.

Also, participants earn new tokens based on the balance of SP that remains vested. The amount of new tokens they receive is directly proportional to the amount of SP they hold relative to the total amount of vested SP across all users.

STEEM Dollars (SBD)

Steem Dollars are created by a mechanism similar to convertible notes, which are often used to fund start-ups. In the start-up world, convertible notes are short-term debt instruments that can be converted to ownership at a rate determined in the future, typically during a future funding round.

Creating token-convertible dollars enables blockchains to grow their network effect while maximizing the return for token holders.

Subjective Contributions

The applications of a currency implementing subjective proof of work are far wider than any objective proof of work system.

The value each currency achieves depends upon the demand for influence within a particular community

Payout Distribution

Each year, 75% of the yearly inflation is distributed to users submitting, voting on, and discussing content. If someone with a $1 balance wishes to perform five transactions at once, they will have to increase their balance to $5 for a week either before or after their transactions.

It is more efficient for users to simply buy and sell the time shares necessary to meet their desired usage rate.

The cost of negotiating micro-loans is greater than the cost of maintaining a balance suitable for your maximum weekly usage.

PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY

Built upon Graphene, that has publicly demonstrated to sustain over 1000 transactions per second on a distributed test network.

Graphene can easily scale to 10,000 or more transactions per second with relatively straightforward improvements to server capacity and communication protocols.

ALLOCATION AND SUPPLY

Of the new tokens that are generated,

75% go to fund the reward pool, which is split between authors and curators
15% of the new tokens are awarded to holders of SP.
10% pays for the witnesses to power the blockchain.

Takeaways from Blue Paper

The unique properties of STEEM make it both “smart” and “social” compared to others, such as Bitcoin and Ether.

STEEM is a social and smart crypto-currency.

These two properties become:

A) Proof of Brain

Mechanisms for establishing and evaluating content’s social value.

B) Rewards pool

A pool of tokens dedicated to incentivizing content creation and curation (called the “rewards pool”).

Tokens are produced differently in DPoS blockchains than they are in PoW blockchains. Steem needed far more scale and speed than that offered by PoW, and so a lesser known algorithm called Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) was leveraged to lay the foundation for a blockchain suited for billions of users.

DPoS

Often bottlenecked by Proof-of-Work (PoW), many blockchains can’t scale beyond three transactions per second, which is a fraction of the world’s financial traffic.

Steem needed far more scale and speed than that offered by PoW, and so a lesser known algorithm called Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) 7 was leveraged to lay the foundation for a blockchain suited for billions of users.

Because of DPoS, the Steem blockchain is able to generate a new block every 3 seconds with minimal computational load. This means that the blockchain can process more transactions and hold more information, including content.

Chainbase

ChainBase 9 is the database portion of the blockchain stack and replaced Graphene 10 in 2016.

ChainBase has faster load and exit times, supports parallel access to the database and is more robust against crashes than its predecessor. It also has less frequent database corruption, allows instant “snapshotting” of entire database state, and can serve more RPC requests from the same
Memory.

Appbase

AppBase enables different cores, or even different computers, to maintain different parts of the Steem blockchain.

Steem Platform Features

Steem is:

1.A digital token processing system.
2.A mainstream social media platform

Primitives Designed for Content Applications

Steem offers users the unique ability to publish and store different types of content directly and permanently into the immutable ledger of the blockchain as plain text.

Several of the blockchain primitives developers can build from include Account Names, Posts, Comments, Votes and Account Balance.

Native Name system

Each participant’s user name is their wallet address, which bolsters the user experience for participants who attempt to send tokens because they can verify the addresses from their own memory.

SBD or Steem Dollars

In order to help bridge the gap between more traditional fiat money systems which mainstream users are used to, and the cryptocurrency tokens which they are awarded through the platform, a new currency called Steem Blockchain Dollars (SBD) was created.

Decentralized Exchange

The Steem blockchain offers a decentralized token exchange, similar to the BitShares exchange.

Users are able to place buy and sell orders, and order matching is performed automatically by the blockchain. This is done in the same way as BitShares.

Multiple Reward Beneficiaries

This includes the author, possible co-authors, referrers, hosting providers, blogs that embedded blockchain comments, and tool developers.

SMT

The final three features touched by STEEM Bluepaper are Stolen Account Recovery, Security through Time-Locks and Bandwidth Rate Limiting for Fee-less Operations, which I didn’t include due to my own self-imposed post length limitations

Conclusion

The unique rewards and incentive program offered by the Steem blockchain and token are designed to make Steem the ultimate on-ramp into cryptocurrency for mainstream users.

I Will be Working to Invest on SP

I haven’t been posting because I’m preparing a long (more than 3000 words) and useful post. It’s getting to be a long, full of obstacles path to achieve what I want. I’m not finding the time to go through the waylaying motions I must do to get to the cooler tasks.

If you already follow me, and you’re reading this, I want to thank you. Also, to let you know that my apparent inactivity is just that. Behind the scenes I’m studying and adjusting myself to the fact that to belong to a community like steemit.com needs serious study, research, and content-related work.

I’m not amounting to much on Steemit right now. I don’t have any post that was valued more than five cents. That might be just blockchain karma. Like, if I didn’t invest in it, why should it invest in me, right? The lack of posts is due to that, I’m still working to be able to exchange a few dollars into STEEM/SP.

^{Image Credit: francousqui
Intro and Extro Content © Martin Wensley 2018}