RE: New people: Why is my post payout changing? Why is it cut in half?
Steem is the true currency of the blockchain. It Is the crypto currency and it is what drives all other aspects of this platform.
Steem Dollars also known as SBD or Steem Backed Dollars are an additional currency designed to be pegged to the US Dollar. The idea was that if people were paid in half of these they could be relatively sure it was worth $1 per SBD. For the past couple of months the peg was broken and it actually went to $2 or more per SBD at times. So SBD at some points if you exchanged was actually worth double what the idea for it was.
So SBD could be viewed as a COMFORT currency. It is currently pegged to the US Dollar. It could be changed to be pegged to something like silver, gold, or something else in the future.
SBD is useful for promoting posts (which actually destroys the currency, which increases value of overall supply). It can be converted to STEEM by several different means. It can be converted to Bitcoin or other crypto currencies via an exchange.
A lot of people buy more steem and then power up their steem power faster as well. I've done this before in the past.
At the moment I leave my steem power alone and don't plan on ever tapping into it unless it is an emergency. I tend to exchange most of my steem dollars for bitcoin and power up things like a bitpay.com/card visa card which I then buy and pay for anything I want.
It is confusing... but really STEEM drives this project. STEEM POWER is an invested version of that which cannot be withdrawn fast. You get 1/15th per week if you go into power down.
STEEM DOLLARS are just a for ease of understanding pegged to a common fiat currency.
In reality SBD should not be something you'd want to play on the market much. It shouldn't vary much from the US Dollar in value if it works correctly.
If you are a speculator or investor then that is where STEEM comes in.
Do you have any idea how that peg is maintained? For regular currency, the currency is steadily bought or sold to maintain the peg.
It is pretty complex. The Witnesses adjust their nodes to setup some percentages and some such which I am no expert on and their activities can increase the price. If the price of Steem Dollars drops too low it will switch to rewarding you with steem and steem power and no steem dollars until it is back on peg. This has happened before. All of this works pretty well... where they have encountered difficulties is when the steem dollar goes above peg. That is apparently not as easy to counter act.
They also added the promote feature back when it was low. When you promote you actually send Steem dollars to NULL which is like burning them. They are no longer in the supply. So the use of promote can help increase the value of steem dollars by burning some of the supply.
As to the rest... still learning. :)
I find the whole thing fascinating from a systems perspective. Appreciate the time you always take to answer my questions. Any idea if there is some central repository where I could find these answers myself? I read the initial steem white paper, but that seems to be somewhat obsolete now and doesn't really go into detail about the mechanics of the whole thing.
Really steemit here and digging into it with Google searches or other searches is the closest you'll find to that. You could also perhaps find some answers from people on the SteemSpeak discord server as some people from Steemit Inc. do hang out there as well as other developers.
It's a lot to keep up with. If I were developing for it I'd be paying more attention. My knowledge just comes from being very involved here for about a year. I do jump into SteemSpeak sometimes but, for me that can be very distracting and before I know it I can lose a day.
The @jerrybanfield post I just resteemed covers most of it.