You are confusing steem power (SP) with voting power (VP). They are tied but not exactly the same.
Each of us is allotted 20% of our voting daily. It takes 24 hours for 10 100% votes to re-power. Hence, when new, to keep your voting power up, you have 10 votes a day. You can check your voting power via a number of sources but I use steemnow.com. Just put your username in at the upper right.
Naturally you want to increase your SP as much as you can...that is money. That is done through purchase (if one is in a position to do that), posting, commenting, and upvoting. If one does not buy in, it is possible to grow an account, it just takes lots of time and effort. You can earn you way to success.
Personally, I am a super bull on steem so I think it worth it for everyone to start getting steem however they can. I have a price target of $100 steem (for what my predictions are worth that is) so a 1,000 SP account will be a fair bit of money...actually a lot of money to most people.
Thank you @taskmaster4450 for your continued generosity and patience with me. I honestly really do appreciate the time you put into your comments. Your handle might be taskmaster4450 but you'll always be taskmaster1 to me.
Thanks for the tip on steemnow.com - I just had a look and while there are a lot of zeros, the voting power percentage is definitely useful. I've been going through all my old posts and upvoting all the good comments.
I intend to purchase Steem on my next pay day. I just noticed you can't buy Steem Power... just Steem the cryptocurrency. I assume I can buy it on the Bittrex exchange and send it across to here... I didn't realise Steem is essentially Steem Power... it kinda makes sense now that I think about it.. but again, a lot of the newbie guides divide these resources up into 3 very separate categories.
Thanks again! You've improved my life on SteemIt by so much percent! Maybe even 65%.
Actually you can buy steem power through blocktrades. You need some crypto before that....I would suggest picking up LTC then sending it through blocktrades...BTC is just getting too slow and costly.
I actually didn't know this. Since I won't use bittrex anymore, I've been waiting for Binance or smaller exchange I use to add it. As soon as holiday spending is over I'll throw $150 in .
I'm sorry, I'm getting confused again... you can buy Steem and Steempower in Blocktrades? Steempower is useful for this platform right? Steem is just to trade as a cryptocurrency?
Steem Power is just steem locked onto your account. You can only convert it back into steem slowly over the course of several weeks. So its a commitment to the platform, and thus the one that affects your upvoting power.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Okay, that was the missing piece! Thank you so much, that actually really helps it all click into place now. I actually really like that concept, it stops people just trading Steem in and out of the platform on price action movements.
No problem!