Great inaugural post, @simoxenham, and welcome to Steem. Cool to see that you caught @adamkokesh's attention.

I’ll be writing up an investigation into how Steemit works and how the technology it is built on might just help revolutionise science

Awesome. I've been really interested in how networks like Steem could be used to incentive science. Happy to provide quotes or answer questions for your piece, if you'd like. It'd be great to see more scientific communication happening on Steem. Not only would posts be more permanent and extensible than on Twitter or Medium, but scientists could get rewarded for communicating in the open.

Currently, the network effect is lacking... there isn't much science discussion going on here. Hopefully your article will spur more science content. For those who don't know, @simonoxenham's article titled Meet the Robin Hood of Science caused a huge spike in Google search interest for Sci-Hub (see Ⓔ below, figure from our recent study):

Sign-up to Steemit, upvote this post and I’ll convert the cryptocurrency I earn as a result of your vote into bitcoin

Note that the rewards from an upvote are proportional to how much Steem Power the user has. So upvotes from new users who haven't invested in or earned Power have a trivial effect on post rewards.

only until March 10th 2018

I'm not sure you'll be able to meet this deadline with the revenue generated from this post. You won't get the SBD (Steem Blockchain Dollars) for another 6 days. And once you get the Steem Power, that takes 13 weeks to fully convert to the liquid currency Steem. An alternative, if you're interested in continuing to use Steem, would be to donate an equivalent amount of your own money and keep the proceeds from this post, thereby essentially making an investment in your Steem account.

One final clarification, the blockchain and protocol is Steem. https://steemit.com is one of many explorers or frontends that you can use to interact with the blockchain. steemit.com is run by Steemit, Inc, the private company that founded Steem and still holds a lot of power.