this is the 2nd short video series I've created and posted on youtube to help people understand the steem blockchain. the idea is to create easy to watch videos to get a quick sense of how the platform works. over the next several weeks i'll be posting 1 new video a week that breaks down the steem blockchain into easy to understand basic videos. hopefully this will serve as a platform for future users who want to get a quick idea of what steem is about! if you have an idea of what i should talk about in the next video, post up and LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS BELOW! all videos are intended to be in the 2-3 minute range!
HOW DOES CRYPTOCURRENCY WORK IN THE STEEM ENVIRONMENT?
The steem blockchain has three types of cryptocurrencies built into it. This might seem a bit awkward and crazy, but there is a tremendous amount of usefulness by having this setup. The three tokens are
- Steem Blockchain Dollars or SBD
- STEEM
- Steem Power
Each token carries a different and unique function, but all three have value relative to each other.
STEEM BLOCKCHAIN DOLLARS (SBD)
SBD is a token that is used as currency in the steem environment. You can use it to interact with the users within the steem community just like US dollars in a real US community. It is roughly pegged to the US dollar so it's relatively price stable. That means 1 SBD is roughly equal to 1 US Dollar at any given moment. This helps you price things in the steem environment just as you would in the real world. You can earn SBD by creating content and being upvoted, or by exchanging USD for SBD and depositing it into your steem wallet.
The reason you want SBD, is the same reason why you want real US Dollars, to pay for goods and services within the steem environment since it can be used as money to finalize transactions.
STEEM
STEEM is the main token that's used to speculate on by investors. You could use this to complete transactions just like bitcoin, but it's value is dependent on market demand, just like the change in price of stocks or bitcoin. If a stock is going up in demand, the price will rise with it. And the reason why people want to buy it, is because they feel they can sell it for more later. So if you think STEEM is more valuable in the future than it is today, then you'll want to invest in STEEM.
Today, on November 20, 2017, STEEM sells for $0.91 USD. If the demand for STEEM increases due to higher demand, to say $8.50, you can sell your STEEM in the future for 8.50 SBD which will always be roughly worth its equal in USD.
The main reason you want STEEM is the same reason why you would of bought google stock in 2003, you thought it would be worth more later. You can use SBD and also STEEM to exchange for the third type of token:
STEEM POWER
Steem power is the trickiest coin within the steem environment because it has very limited use, but it is the most powerful tool in the Steem environment. Steem power is used to determine how influential you are in the community. It's like having "The Force". The more Steem Power you have, the better your Force is. You can also buy Steem Power with SBD or STEEM. This action is refered to as Powering Up.
While this sounds like a rather annoying thing to allow, it actually works quite well because the only reason someone would invest in Steem Power, would be to increase their visibility and influence to other members of the community. Steem power also allows you to earn a return on your money much like keeping money in a savings account.
So for the sake of self preservation, a user with a large amount of SP, is highly interested in being a productive member of the steem environment.
Steem power is NOT liquid and in order to sell your Steem Power for STEEM or SBD, you have to allocate a certain amount to be paid out in 13 equal weeks. This is necessary to keep only those who are most vested in the system to store steem power.
RECAP
If you want to use the block chain to send and receive money for goods and services, you'll want to trade your USD for SBD and use it like a checking account.
If you want to invest in the platform because you think it has greater future value, buy STEEM Tokens as if it were stock.
Personally, if you think your content has real value and you really think you can build an audience who wants to listen, read or watch what you have to say, then you should invest as much as you can into Steem power and then create content.
what are some videos you want me to explain in a 3 minute video? In the next video, I want to talk about how to leverage SP for maximum gain, unless you guys have other ideas!
Everyone watch this video and share it with your family this holiday.. it is our duty to help everyone become educated about the current financial system and the future of technology. Everyone needs to watch this video as we move into the age of the blockchain
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@mmosely0/everyone-must-watch-this-video
this is a awesome post. thank you for the post
interesting article very good way to explain thank you
thanks!
This post has received a 44.84 % upvote from @boomerang thanks to: @motoengineer
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This post has received a 7.35 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @motoengineer.
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Nice ..keep doing
thanks man!!!!
Great boss... You explained it as nicely,,,,,,,,,,
thanks!
Thank you for this, I am a new member and it can become confusing sometime learning how it all works. This helps me a lot. Great post.
To be honest I wonder about the concept of the Steem Power which is used to determine one's influence in the Steem environment. Think about the advertisement industry. When the big players of the advertisement industry began to use the Steem environment to advertise, they will simply dominate everyone else timeline and the concept money talks will be normal practice here.
that is a potential, but the decentralization of the system will allow users to simply refuse to upvote their content, rendering it a loss in terms of revenue. in doing so, their efforts can be fruitless. Obviously your eyes are still subjected to the postings, but unlike advertisements where you have to watch before you can access the content, you can decide if they earn money from the rewards pool or not. This decentralization is the main way to combat big money that does things the users dont want.
Agreed but advertisement itself as it is and as I refer to does not intend to earn money from the rewards pool, but rather from the return that the advertised products or service reaches in terms of selling . Higher steem power means more people looking at the advertisement. The rewards pool for an advertisement agency point of view is a bonus. However IF I am right to the point that the advertisement industry dominates the steem timeline, it means that Steem will be on a high and we would, could or should (still) profit from Steem as an investment asset.
Agreed. Yet, if your content is outstanding, you don't even need to invest much.
What about vote buying? You paid six different boosters in order to improve the visibility of this article, but you didn't even mention that as a strategy here.
You may be careful since there are a lot of people getting flagged for such behaviour lately. Just have a look at the flag reports of @yougotflagged. It's not very well seen to buy a trending position on this platform...
I didn't mention that as a strategy here for several reasons, the first is that the video lives on youtube, and ultimately I want it to pop up on the search over there so they can migrate here, so its more of an educational series I am creating. I dont put up ads on youtube because they dont pay enough to justify the headache and its a barrier to watching the content.
For my use of boosters, I am doing a 30 day challenge of posting everyday where I talk specifically about engineering topics (so the viewership is potentially consistent since its geared towards the same crowd of people).
There is inherently an issue with having your content getting buried. If you look at my wallet, for the past few weeks, you'll notice that I've been experimenting heavily with boosters and there is a reason for this which Ill devote an entire video to in video 4 or 5 (video 3 will be how upvoting works).
The first week I decided to try boosters out, I did so because I didn't want to transfer straight to Steem Power, instead I wanted to cycle the money through upvote bots to push my content to the top of the page, regardless if it was considered good by the community or not. So I bought upvotes, which are returned to me if the booster vote is atleast equal to the amount I paid. There is a potential for lost revenue in this scenario. In this process I noticed that minnows will upvote to earn curation rewards, but very few people upvoted my content. I gained a few whales upvoting my content as well.
In the second week, I scaled back my purchase of booster rewards in $, but not in volume because I noticed that the ratio of upvotes to view counts was still similar to the first week. Recall that in both cases, the content was exactly the same, my engineering 101 series.
I am now entering my 3rd week and if you look at my wallet now, i've sold all my SBD (since it pumped last night), so I will rely soley on my content to be self promoting.
In my 4th week, I will be going back to boosters unless the SBD price is too high.
All of this is a way to gauge behavior of steemians which I want to put into another video.
If i get flagged or not, it really doesnt matter to me because I have questions and no one really has the answers since everything is so new. You practically have to do everything yourself.
It should be obvious, but buying upvotes is not sustainable because I will run out o money to invest in steemit eventually. I also dont know what most upvote bots do with their earnings which is an ethical issue.
Thanks for the insights! That's been a lot of unexpected information on your blogging strategies :-)
To be honest I'm glad to hear that excessive vote buying doesn't seem to be very lucrative - at least for the buyer. In my opinion these services are considerably harming the eco-system of Steem since their own interest is to drain the rewards pool and put as much money as they can into their own pockets.
However, that's not the core ideology of Steem. Steemit was created to give value back to the ones who create value. Value is measured in quality of content here. Vote trading services completely undermine this approach. According to their algos, quality is irrelevant, while the only thing that counts is how much money you're able to invest.
In the end that makes life even worse for new users since they usually don't start with a giant wallet.
So your one month strategy is somehow contributing to complicate your own situation on steemit. If I were you, I'd rather focus on long term growth. Look at vloggers on steemit like @exyle for instance. These people produce excellent quality content without any need to buy upvotes. They're simply good :-)
If you were flagged by the account I mentioned, all your earnings from the past 7 days would be completely lost. It's a quite powerful one. So believe me, it's not just a flag :-)
Also the more established users have many answers to questions you might have. Have you gone in touch with anybody here from the community? I'm here since 1.5 years and have watched and also published uncountable tutorial videos. Not everything needs to be done from zero...
Yet, if your own interest was making quick money and you didn't want to engage at all, then of course it would be complicated to get some answers :-)
This is a 'social network' after all.
Good luck!
Marly -
PS: You might be interested in a tutorial I published a couple of months back. It helps you to make the video views that are generated on steemit count in your YouTube account:
How To Properly Embed YouTube Videos On Steemit
Thanks for your reply. The reality is that the community which replies in the manner you just did, doesn't exist on a large enough scale yet. The reason for that is that the community within steemit is not focused, nor is it multi dimensional. Other people may not feel that way because they have a micro community within steemit. I am unfortunately part of none because the content I enjoy producing (videos about machines and adventures) is completely outdwarfed by the cyrpto talk that goes on. Its winter time right now, so I can shift to crypto talks, allowing me to focus on the main topic that steemians love to discuss.
I follow @exyle and pop my head in once in a while, but I don't personally find any enjoyment from the majority of his content. I'm not saying he is a bad vlogger, I just don't find it personally entertaining. I wouldn't price his content at the value of his upvotes, but thats why we have the choice in upvoting. If you compared his upvote value to the actual number of views on the youtube counter, its disproportionate. Again, part of the reason that this occurs is that the community focus is on his favorite topic to discuss. This will hopefully be fixed when the communities feature finally gets released.
I've got a lot to say about this, which is a whole video I want to do. Core ideology and reality do not mix when the ideology is decentralized. You will ALWAYS have a situation where people try to game the system. But the very fact that you game the system is also why people will work the system in an honest way.
The trick is to reduce the impact of those who game it. In fact the original white paper for steemit back in 2016 stated that if you were to actually work that hard to game the system, you have produced enough work to have benefited the system. Strange, but me buying upvotes, has actually allowed me to AB test my content delivery method. At what cost though? if you calculate how much money those bots earn, it really isnt a lot because the system also prevents voting abuse.
As far as connecting with other users, PLEASE give me some recommendations! I don't see a lot of content outside of cryptocurrency that I enjoy. Either is rare and doesnt really exist or its so damn hard to find anything here!
Also, I make my videos from scratch because I've just recently gotten into making videos and I hardly talk in my videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/Kui00). So I'm trying to fix up my on camera speech. Talking about steemit helps me understand the environment better because it forces me to research it and look for ways to make it understandable. Double edge sword, but both edges benefit me.
ill defintely check out your video, but another problem with steemit, which has been mentioned countless times when they asked for suggestions, is the lack of ability to categorized things!
So with that said, you've been followed by me! Follow back, vote and lets help each other earn money etc etc barf insert generic comment that makes me seem shallow. lol
With vote trading we don't have it anymore, meaning that a vote doesn't reflect an opinion anymore. That's my key issue here.
Yip, the content structure is a mess here - haha! No chance to find anything here. I addressed the wish to improve that submitting some ideas for the #roadmap2018. I hope it will be their priority.
Here's my philosophy about becoming successful on steemit:
So: YEAH! Let's cooperate, share ideas and help each other. I'm in! :-)
Followed back
Watched the video!
I agree with the sentiment, and I think you are 100% correct in that you should be thinking about what you can provide for the platform. But I don’t think its correct to say that you will rewarded for your content because that pushes one huge factor, which is being seen. You will only be rewarded if your content is actually seen. This is something that most steemians have realized.
What I do want to highlight is the mentality of what steem really is about, and why steem is so difficult to gain traction on.
Steem is a lot like real life. You have to do things because you want to do them, not because there is an incentive to do it. Steem’s environment exactly replicates that of the real world, where you have to fight tooth and nail to get someone’s attention. Steem’s token system has even created a monetary system where people have developed loaning SP with interest rates. This all mimics real life. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
After my 3rd week of experimenting with no booster engineering talks, I might just swap over to daily videos about steemit because I’m honestly not finding an audience. And I think that largely has to do with the fact that people don’t care about that topic here. People care about crypto here. And that wont change unless the communities features is introduced!
The more we talk, the more I like your way of thinking :-)
Probably any type of social network is a mirror of real life scenarios. Dezentralization tries to avoid that, or better said pretends to create something new. But it's hard to break with the established rules that shaped our lives over decades.
I'm also impatiently waiting for the community feature. This in combination with SMTs could build something huge!
I hope that the ones who have invested decent amounts of Steem will be patient enough to wait a couple of months more. The power down button is just one click away and Steem is not the only decentralized project out there.
Extremely helpful video. Thanks man!
Your post has been resteemed to +144 follower by @afm007
Thanks.