STEEM was announcement on Bitcointalk thread, on March 24, 2016.
STEEM is a blockchain database that supports community building and social
interaction with cryptocurrency rewards. Steem combines concepts from
social media with lessons learned from building cryptocurrencies and their
communities. An important key to inspiring participation in any community,
currency or free market economy is a fair accounting system that consistently
reflects each person's contribution. Steem is the first cryptocurrency that
attempts to accurately and transparently reward an unbounded number of
individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.
Steem is an experiment designed to address challenges in the cryptocurrency and social
media industries by combining the best aspects from both. Steem presents earning
opportunities to content creators and internet readers in ways that have not existed within
the social media industry. Within Steem, individuals earn real rewards online that are
directly correlated to their contributions. Their rewards will have dollar value due to the
market price discovery and liquidity of Steem, and the people who hold Steem will have
more exclusive earning powers than those who do not.
There are some key principles that have been used to guide the design of Steem. The most
important principle is that everyone who contributes capital to a venture should receive a
pro-rata share in the venture. This principle is the same principle that is applied to all
startups as they allocate shares at founding and during subsequent funding rounds.
The second principle is that all forms of capital are equally valuable. This means that those
who contribute their scarce time and attention toward producing and curating content for
others are just as valuable as those who contribute their scarce cash. This is the sweat equity
principle and is a concept that prior cryptocurrencies have often had trouble providing to
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more than a few dozen individuals.
The third principle is that the community produces products to serve its members. This
principle is exemplified by credit unions, food co-ops, and health sharing plans, which serve
the members of their community rather than sell products or services to people outside the
community.
The Steem community provides the following services to its members:
Steem’s purposeful realignment of economic incentives has the potential to produce fairer
and more inclusive results for everyone involved than the social media and cryptocurrency
platforms that have gone before it. This paper will explore the existing economic incentives
and demonstrate how Steem’s incentives may result in better outcomes for most
participants.
Daniel Larimer - "bytemaster"
Ned Scott
