Steemit was founded in early 2016 by Ned
Scottand Daniel Larimer.
Having worked together before, they met for a
discussion in January 2016 and found that they shared
a common vision for an online social economy. The
social media portion of this, Steemit, is just the
beginning. In the future, we hope it can be combined
with other blockchain-based features, organizations,
and third party apps, all geared towards improving
peoples’ lives in measurable ways.
Ned Scott is Steemit’s CEO. Based in New York City,
he has a background in financial services and business
operations. Over the last few years, he had been
investing in the Bitcoin space and sharing its
opportunities with Wall Street investors. After
becoming interested in cryptocurrency, Scott
approached Daniel Larimer about creating a
blockchain-based social media site that would allow
community members to create a mutual aid society.
They soon decided that they could accomplish much
more than this with Steemit.
Larimer, Steemit’s CTO, is a programmer based in
Virginia. He has been involved in cryptocurrencies
since the early days of Bitcoin. He one of the few
living people to have exchanged messages on Bitcoin’s
public forum with Satoshi Nakamoto, the legendary and
elusive creator of Bitcoin. Larimer famously told
Satoshi that Bitcoin was not fast enough, which seems
to have foreshadowed his achievements.
Larimer went on to found BitShares, one of the most
innovative Cryptocurrency 2.0 projects. BitShares
attracted a team of talented programmers, working
under the label of Cryptonomex, who improved upon
Bitcoin’s blockchain technology by creating the ultra-
powerful Graphene toolkit that now powers Steemit. It
enables lightning-fast transactions and instant
payments withextremely tight security. BitShares also
has enjoyed a large and heavily involved community of
users who helped create, test, and refine its
decentralized exchange.
When Scott and Larimer began work on Steemit, they
already had an expert technical team and they also
had an active community of users from BitShares,
Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrency projects. They did
not have to spend time recruiting and training a new
group of programmers, though others have joined the
project. Having a ready-made community of supporters
and an active user base is almost unheard of for a
startup. Many companies buy smaller competitors just
to acquire a user base, but Steemit already had a
foundation of people who could test the site and begin
to share it across the Internet.
From there, the growth has come quickly and steadily,
yet it is only just beginning. As we writethis, Reddit
has about 38 million users, Twitter 300 million, and
Facebook 1 billion. They offergimmicks such as karma
points and likes and meaningless upvotes, but none of
them pay users. Steemit should continue to grow as
fast as word-of-mouth can spread it. Since the four
coauthors of this book began using Steemit in the
spring of 2016, it already has grown by many
thousands of users, and we believe that is only the
beginning.
Why does this growth matter to you? Because Steemit
will still be a young site for a while. It has lots of room
for growth and you have the power to get in early. The
more reward tokens you build up in Steemit, the more
you effectively will have a stake in future growth. And
your stake can grow proportionately along with Steemit
until you decide to cash it out in price-stable currency
tokens that are worth about $1 each and can be
converted to Bitcoin or other currencies.