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The big actors of the Internet (Facebook, Google, Twitter ...) collect billions of dollars each year thanks to the content created by their users free of charge in exchange for the proposed service. The richness of these sites relies heavily on the time spent by Internet users in creating content. Of course, the agreement between the parties is engraved in the general conditions of use and therefore it is mandatory to assign the ownership and / or rights of the content produced. The money goes mainly to shareholders for rather banal services that do not rely on advanced technologies (except rare cases like Google Street).
For example, the investment group Elevation Partners, which includes among its six partners the singer of U2, Bono Vox, had purchased in 2009 the 2.3% of shares of Facebook for a sum of 56 million pounds sterling . In August 2015, these shares were worth 1.3 billion euros ...
Collaborative alternatives are paving the way: the key factor in community participation should be a correct and transparent accounting system that reflects the contribution of each person. In 2014, Reddit formulated an innovative hypothesis: its platform would be much better if the world that contributes to reddit.com by posting articles, comments or voting was rewarded with a participation in Reddit, Inc.
In 2016, Steem emerged: a blockchain that combines the concepts of social media and cryptocurrencies and changes the way of belonging to a social network by redistributing much of the value collectively produced to the people who provide the contributions. The idea was described in March 2016 in a whitepaper that we summarize in this article.
Members can upload content they deem appropriate. The upvoted authors also receive a monetary reward in the Steem cryptocurrency and two other tokens named Steem Dollars (SMD) and Steem Power (SP). Steem thus becomes the first cryptocurrency that openly rewards its players according to the rules of smart contracts internal to its blockchain. Currency is similar to Bitcoin: it uses proof-of-work as a mechanism of consensus and emission. However, the reward that goes to minors is only a small part of the amount created at each block, the rest being paid to authors and curators.
The general concept is similar to that of other blog sites (including Reddit). However, in steem, only text content is saved in a blockchain. Images and multimedia content must be retrieved via other Web sites (decentralized or not).
Some key principles guided the design of Steem.
The most important is that those who contribute receive a pro rata property, profits and possibly take on the debt of the company (a principle that always applies to start-ups).
The second principle is that all forms of capital are welcome and have the same value: those who contribute in their free time to the production of content are valued as much as those who contribute by placing their money. A concept known as Sweat Equity that other cryptocurrencies are struggling to provide to more than a few dozen individuals.
The third principle is that the community produced to serve before all its members. This criterion is the same as that of credit or agricultural cooperatives ... which make the sale / purchase between members of the community rather than outside.
The Steem Community provides the following services to its members:
Steem is designed according to a bottom-up (bottom-up) logic with the idea of lowering barriers to adoption as much as possible. For Steem, the same factors that have made large social web platforms grow can grow a new social cryptocurrency. It is the synergy between cryptocurrency and social media that makes Steem unique.
Steem not only realigns the economic incentives of social networks for fairer results for contributors but also introduces interesting technical innovations in relation to the blockchain that existed before it.
The first technical challenge is to find an algorithm to attribute points to subjective contributions and that is considered by all stakeholders fairly and neutral. This algorithm must be resistant to attacks and manipulation attempts for the diversion of profits. A flaw in the scoring system would immediately be followed by a loss of confidence in the system.
The basic solution normally used by sites
one-user = one-vote
leaves the door open to numerous drifts (sybil attack). That's why Steem uses another technique.
The base unit of the platform is its cryptographic token: STEEM. Each account holds STEEM and Steem reasoning according to the rule:
one-STEEM = one-vote
thus the actors who have contributed the most (ie those with more STEEM on their behalf) have more influence on how to attribute points to the different contributions.
But the logic goes further: Steem allows its members to vote with STEEM only if they are engaged in a sort of long-term investment plan (at least two years). Following this model, members are financially encouraged to vote in a manner that maximizes the long-term value of their STEEMs.
A system is needed to identify and rank contributions by estimating their relative value, a system that also adapts to scaling to a potentially unlimited number of people. A system that has proved successful in such an assessment is the free market, and yet the free market is not ideal: most contributions have very little value and would be difficult to take into account. This is the reason why many websites with content micropayments have never taken off.
Steem is designed to allow efficient micropayments. For this, the economic equation is modified: readers no longer have to decide whether to pay from their pockets to read content but they vote for or against an article. Steem uses the sum of these votes to remunerate the authors.
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