A few questions:
I've never been able to comprehend the idea that money is debt. I know that it is, but I fail to comprehend why. Can you explain that more deeply?
How do I figure out what my voting power is at any given time?
I'll use 100% when I don't have enough SP to set a weight
What is a weight and how do I view fellow steemians activity on the steem blockchain?
Thanks :)
Money is debt because debt is another word for expectations. You expect to be able to trade that money in the future for at least the equivalent purchasing power you could have had now. Since SBD maintains a close peg to the dollar, then it represents a debt of future steem that must be repaid. More steem if the price of steem in dollar terms goes down and less steem if the price of steem in dollar terms goes up.
SBD is literal debt. At any point someone can convert SBD to STEEM. When they do this, the SBD is destroyed and the market must then print new steem. If the dollar value of steem has been dropping, then more steem is printed than was destroyed and this puts pressure on the price of steem to go further downward. It feeds a vicious cycle. By promoting posts you burn SBD and take some of the pressure off the price of steem since this is a debt that no longer needs to be repaid.
It is the network that pays this debt. But each and everyone of us, is the network.
Steem print new SBD the way they don't dilute the STEEM supply. STEEM is backed by the market, it has value because the market participants think it has value. SBD is different, because if we let the market decide its price, it would fluctuate as any other unstable currency.
So, Steem print an SBD "out of air" and says that anyone who has 1SBD will get 1USD worth of STEEM for it at any time. So the Steem network releases a debt note that must be payed back in the future with STEEM.
I'm using Busy at most of the times, so I don't need to go elsewhere to check that. You could also see your voting power there, but there are many different sites that provide that information.
The voting weight is the percentage that you can set while you are upvoting or downvoting contents. That means you don't use all of your power for a given vote when you set a percentage less than 100%. For e.g. if you would be a whale, and find a good picture you want to upvote, but your vote with 100% weight would give the author $1000 for that, you can set it lower to give your upvote without irrational rewards.
SteemStats is a good place when you want to view other users activity.