Finance:Steemit

Steemit

Type of site	Social news community
Available in	Mainly English (content is also available in several other languages, e.g. German, French, or Spanish)
Website	https://steemit.com/
Alexa rank	1,788 ((As of June 2018)
Registration	Free. Mandatory for editing.
Users	+ 1 Million users
Launched	March 24, 2016 (2016-03-24)
Current status	Active

Steemit is a blogging and social networking website owned by Steemit Inc that uses the Steem blockchain to reward publishers and curators. The Steem blockchain produces Steem and Steem Backed Dollars which are tradable tokens obtained for posting, discovering, and commenting on content.

Steemit, Inc. is a privately held company based in New York City and headquartered in Virginia. The company was founded by Ned Scott, and Dan Larimer, creator of BitShares, and EOS.

Concept

User accounts can upvote posts and comments similar to other blogging websites or social news websites like Reddit, and the authors who get upvoted can receive a monetary reward in a cryptocurrency token named Steem and United States dollar -pegged tokens called Steem Dollars. People are also rewarded for curating (discovering) popular content. Curating involves voting comments and post submissions. Vote strength and curation rewards are influenced by the amount of Steem Power held by the voter.

Steemit includes third-party applications, such as DTube, a decentralized video platform based on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) protocol. DTube is similar to YouTube, but without advertisements, instead uses the built-in Steem currency which gets awarded by users upvoting videos.

Monetary system

Steem is an original token design that is not based on any predecessors. The Smart Media Token (SMT) protocol (developed by Steemit inc.) builds on the base Steem token and allows anyone to create an entirely new token, backed by Steem. SMTs allow any website to financially reward content and comments created by the site's users and allow the definition of unique rules for the new SMT token that are independent of those affecting the original Steem tokens. As of December 2017, CoinMarketCap.com listed Steem with a $475 million market capitalization, and ranked Steem tokens 32nd of 1,358 cryptocurrencies. User actions such as upvoting facilitate Steem's Proof-of-Brain algorithm, which also factors in the Steem Power a user holds, to provide incentives for content creators and the community by transferring small amounts of the Steem token currency.

Steem began with a highly inflationary supply model, doubling roughly every year.

On July 4, 2016, Steemit, Inc. launched Steemit, a social media platform with virtual currency rewards that runs over the Steem blockchain. On July 14, 2016, Steemit announced on their website that they were hacked. The attack, according to them, has compromised about 260 accounts. A little less than US$85,000 worth of Steem Dollars and Steem are reported to have been taken by the attackers.

Unlike most digital currencies which are difficult to access for the majority of the world without any money to invest, Steem removes the friction for the average person to join in the cryptocurrency world by allowing earnings via posting without needing to buy in first.

Criticism

Joe Lee, co-founder and CIO of digital currency trading platform Magnr, told CoinDesk, "Whether Steem succeeds as a digital currency will be more a reflection of Steemit’s success as a platform as opposed to the economics of the coin itself. This is a good example of a digital currency whose value will be closely affiliated to its utilitarian value as a social networking and sharing platform."

"I'm skeptical about 'appcoins'/'appchains,' and Steem is very much one," stated algorithmic trader Jacob Eliosoff.

External links

• publishing platform
• Steem cryptocurrency used by Steemit
• DTube third-party video platform on Steemit