Powering Communities and Opportunities - Steem

Steem's challenge is to create a system capable of identifying the contributions that are needed and their relative worth, using a methodology that can scale to an unbounded number of people. Steem is designed to enable effective micropayments for all kinds of contributions by changing the economic equation:

Readers can vote content up or down and Steem will use their votes to determine individual rewards.

Steem has 3 different asset classes: 

• Steem (STEEM)- the liquid currency. You can earn it by posting, commenting etc...
• Steem Power (SP) - Users are able to commit their STEEM to a 13-week vesting schedule, providing them with additional benefits within the platform. Committed STEEM is called Steem Power (SP). When users vote on content, their influence is directly proportional to the amount of SP that they have.
• Steem Dollars (SBD) is similar to convertible notes, for startups. It allows the holder to convert to the backing token with minimum notice at the fair market price of the token.

Since December 2016, Steem began creating new tokens at an annual inflation rate of 9.5%. The inflation rate decreases at a rate of 0.01% every 250,000 blocks, or about 0.5% per year.

Of the new tokens that are generated: 

• 75% go to fund the reward pool, which is split between authors and curators. 
• 15% of the new tokens are awarded to holders of SP 
• 10% pays for the witnesses to power the blockchain.

• Content creation
  Create interesting and valuable content on Steemit to earn STEEM as a content creator
• Freelance work
  Offer your skills to the community
• Take part in Contests and Challenges
• Lease/Renting out your Steem Power
  Buy some STEEM from exchanges and power up your STEEM to Steem Power then rent/lease it out to other Steemit users for daily Steem payment to your wallet.

Steem’s blockchain (Graphene) is a variation of the Bitcoin Blockchain. It also powers Bitshares and EOS:

• A block is created every 3 seconds.
• The consensus algorithm involves 21 witnesses who verify the blocks.
• Each block contains: the texts of all posts and comments, transactions of Steem between users, upvotes and downvotes , follow, unfollow, etc.

In 2020 Steamit.com, the biggest platform where for the Steem blockchain was aquired and it seemed the descentralized advantage vanished as a private actor owned 80% of the coins. 

The community forked the project and a competing platform called HIVE launched to compete with Steem.