I attend a mini meetup last Saturday, hosted by none other than Senpai @AaronLeang. A big shout out to him, thank you for being so patient to answer all of our questions. I realized that most of us is not tech savvy enough to grasp the idea of Cryptocurrency, the whole Decentralized concept and much more.
Since I had benefited from this platform, I would like to contribute some of my knowledge, to provide a helping hand. Thus come this super layman guide to all newcomer to Steemit.
Once again, Welcome!
What is Cryptocurrency?
Cryptocurrency is an electronic cash system that relies on peer-2-peer network for validation process. For short, some sort of Internet Money.
Image Credit: Quora.com
Cryptocurrency don't appear out from thin air, tho. An individual "mines" to acquire some of these cryptocurrency. Imagine you go to bank and made a money transfer. You will get a receipt, stating when, where, how much you had transferred, whom you had transferred etc. Mining is essential doing all those paperwork, to process and validate those transaction using sets of protocols that the community agrees on. At the end of the day, the individual that processed those paperwork will be rewarded with a token of the said cryptocurrency environment.
These tokens hold value when the community gains external recognition, as we all knew that value is very subjectives. In macroeconomics environments, the value of certain object is determined by the supply and demand of the said object in the environment. In short, there is value because people believed in that long string of alphanumeric sequences.
Image Credit: xresch
What is Steemit?
Imagine it as a Role Play Game, where you level up by posting stuffs, earn money and attack power on the way up, make new friends and eventually you able to sell the in game cash for real cold hard cash.
Image Credit: Nintendo
Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dolar
Steem is the token you received on this platform while Steem Power is a scale to measure your ability to influence on this platform. Steem Dollar is actually an IOU since the production of Steem could not catch up with consumption of Steem.
Wallet Tab
In RPG context, Steem is your attribute points and SP is your damage. You can freely convert your Steem to SP or vice versa, just that converting SP to Steem takes a long time (13 weeks to be exact) to complete. You can rent SP from another player, or lease your SP to other player.
Steem Dollar is the in game currency of this platform. Most if not all transaction within the platform requires you to pay certain amount of SBDs. In other words, you can buy (consuming SBD) Attribute Points (Steem) for the internal market, then power up your damage(Steem Power).
Posting
You are allowed to post anything onto the platform. However, please be reminded that everything is open to view by all and it will be permanently scribe onto the blockchain after seven days. Do post with discretion, I suggest.
New post page
You can imagine that posting is like heading to raid the dungeons. You will be rewarded at the end, 50% in SP and 50% in SBD. The more you post, the better those post are, the larger the reward it is.
Upvote and Comments
Upvotes are “Like” on Facebook, “Love” on Instagram etc. On Steemit platform tho, upvote carry a monetary value, determined by the vote caster’s Steem Power. Thus, a powerful player (lots of SP) or many players come upvotes your post is equally favourable.You can imagine this as forming a party to raid the dungeon together. When you post something, other player comes to the aid (upvote your post), while your friends raid a dungeon, you go help them out (upvote their post).
Thanks for the upvotes and comments!
Also, by aiding the other players grinding forward (upvote their post), you will earn some SP too! This upvote and comment action reward, is known as curation reward. The exact reward is determined by a complex equation that cover many variables such as voter’s SP, voting time, number of votes etc.