Everything you need to know about Steem in 262 words

Steem is a blockchain-based social media platform. It relies on Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars.

It rewards you (50% Steem power, 50% Steem dollars) for:

1) Creation of upvoted content. Create meaningful, original content. Post often.

2) Curation when you are among the first to upvote future popular content.

- Steem can be traded like any cryptocurrency. By purchasing Steem and powering it up it into Steem Power, the holder will earns more Steem in rewards and voting power. The total number of Steem doubles each year. Every 3.32 years, a 10:1 reverse split occurs (10 Steem becomes 1).

- Steem Power rewards long term holding. Steem Power is non-transferrable and will require 2 years and 104 payments to convert back to Steem. 90% of the new Steem goes to anyone holding Steem Power. 10% of the new Steem goes to anyone voting on a post or contributing.

- 1 Steem Dollar = 1 dollar value stored

Steem can be mined (Ubuntu, Windows). Mining requires operating a full node and building Steem from source. A witness is any full node that processes and validates blocks. This is a necessary prerequisite to produce blocks. Once your proof of work is accepted by the network it is critical that your node stays connected so it can produce a block at the scheduled time. Each round (21 blocks) one miner gets to produce a block. A round can take at least 63 seconds if everyone produces a block. The miner queue length is proportional to the difficulty. Difficulty doubles with every additional 4 miners in the queue.