Making Money with Steemit (Steem Dollars and Steem Power explained)

A lot of fuss has been going around SteemIt in the past few months. Steemit is kind of a social news platform that pays users with digital currency called Steem for posting and upvoting good content. Think of Reddit, but with a nice add-on of getting paid for your participation.

The problem as I see it with Steemit, is that the concept is just too hard to grasp. There are too many confusing concepts. For example, you have Steemit which is the platform, Steem – the digital currency, Steem power, Steem dollars and it all becomes one big mish mash of unexplained terms. In the end the average user who wants to get started with Steemit is left confused and leaves the platform.

In this post I will try to make some sense out of these terms and the platform in general, and help you understand how to get started with Steemit if this is something you’d like to pursue.

A bit of history about Steem

Steem (the digital currency, not to be confused with Steemit the website) was first described in a whitepaper in March 2016. Steem and Steemit were in Beta until July 4th 2016. Once the platform (Steemit) became live and payments were made to the contributors, the currency saw a 1800% increase in its price from $0.24 to $4.63. However, since then the hype dulled down and the currency has slowly declined back to $0.28.

This explosive growth and fast demise of the currency made people suspect Steem was perhaps just another Pump and Dump scheme. In such a scheme the founders and early adopters drive up the currency value through media hype and then sell off their coins at a huge profit. The people who get hurt by this are the late joiners who are stuck with a lot of coins that lost their value.

The Steemit platform however has grown immensely in the past few months. Here’s how the traffic on Steem grew according to Alexa’s web ranking

In all fairness I haven’t used Steem or Steemit (the platform) personally, and I’m still just trying to figure all of this out. This article is the first step in making sense of it all…

Steem, Steem Dollars and Steem Power explained
In order to make some sense of the whole ecosystem I started digging up YouTube videos about Steem and the Steemit platform, this is probably one of the best ones I’ve found that makes complete sense: