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I love the idea of a Fact sheet ( *cheat sheet* ) great idea Justine and good to start a discussion. If you need me to make it pretty I have a graphic designer that can help.

I was thinking you right it is hard to explain things that offer so much. I mean just imagine trying to explain the internet ?

I suppose it is best to hit on one or two points and see if it catches their interest.

>For me it’s special as it was my bridge to the crypto world. I wanted no part of bitcoin, it was confusing and overwhelming.. 

We've always said Steem is the normies of crypto if done right. You and I have been both preaching it for awhile.  As for Bitcoin it was an interesting beast back in the day . I got involved in in 2011 and watched the community create what it is and have come to the conclusion you need a community around this technology to move it forward. Most people don't know  but without forums like btctalk we probably don't have much to do with Bitcoin in the  way people know about it today.  One of the main reasons I'm here is new technology can't launch without a community. 

Steem is clearly built to launch  whatever  dapp, technology it  wants through its communities which is Golden in my opinion. Built in marketing. I know this is top level stuff and we need to drill down in the technology which you address in the questions below.

One factoid I'll leave here is it provides a real safe place to keep your funds via the "savings" mechanism.  By having a lock up'd function which can only be released in 3 days it provides the necessary protection of funds.

<center>![savings.PNG](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmY8h75U7TkQXrRDbRXb8yXxJz5F8GyA6vj9VKGk11TQM2/savings.PNG)</center>

As we've seen with [crypto hacks](https://www.coindesk.com/upbit-is-the-sixth-major-crypto-exchange-hack-of-2019) , seems everyone is getting hack these days! It would be nice tout ourselves as a fairly safe place to keep funds. Not sure many online wallets offer this?

I'll circle back around answer some of the questions you proposing here. Great questions to try to tackle.

**Happy thanksgiving to you and let's go enjoy some pumpkin pie! <3**

Hmm, I'll take a whack at this. Don't know if everything is 100% accurate, but it's to the best of my understanding.

> What is Steem? Is the tech superior to say EOS, ETH or bitcoin? If so, how? If it’s not.. why is it needed? Does the chain actually need its own currency?

So answering "What is Steem?" Is a much longer conversation, but relative to the other guys I'd say it's different. It doesn't have the security of Bitcoin, or the flexibility of ETH, but since it's designed to do just a few things really well, it's better than all of them for what IT does. Bitcoin is too slow to do what Steem does, ETH is probably too slow as well and would more than likely run into scaling issues trying to do what Steem does. So I's say, Steem is the best at what it was designed to do.
A blockchain that doesn't have it's own currency is probably bullshit. ie It doesn't really need to be a blockchain. Without a decentralized currency that incentives block producers to produce blocks, there won't be any organic decentralization. More than likely just a centralized database or set of nodes all with one centralized controller.

> What are the “fast and free” transactions? Will transactions be free forever? How does that work?

The speed of the transactions plays into the fact that Steem was designed with social applications in mind, so this was necessary for that to be possible. If the transactions weren't free, this would also probably not work for social applications since we send thousands and thousands of tiny micro-transactions a second via voting.

The transactions should always be free because of the Resource Credits system which limits network bandwidth based on SP holdings.

RC Delegation and Pools should make it possible to onboard a lot of users quickly by shifting the RC load from the individual user to application developers.

To put it simply, Steem Power gets you Resource Credits which are each users bandwidth allocation on the network. Anyone past Minnow has plenty more RC's than they'll need personally and a whale has enough RC's for an entire community. Once these can be delegated and pooled we'll be able to manage the resources of the network in a more efficient way than some people having WAY more than they'll ever need and others not having enough.

> Is it centralized? What is the distribution look like compared to in the beginning? What makes it “decentralized”?

Yes and No. The infrastructure is decentralized but currently Steemit Inc. owns the vast majority of the stake, if you combine that with the next 100 largest accounts, most of the stake is centralized in a few accounts, but...
There is nothing stopping anyone from buying a large stake, ie if Bezos decided he liked Steem, he could easily buy enough Steem to hold a controlling stake. It's all still up for grabs and no one has control over that. Also over time it is becoming more decentralized. More stake across more accounts, and the reality is, this is the only way it could be. All cryptocurrencies will start centralized into a few accounts and get further decentralized from there, that's the nature of it and that's what's happening with Steem.

> What makes it unique? What are the use cases it offers that are not found elsewhere?

The economics, the distribution system, the specific balance of the different inflation pools, the technical specifications etc. Each one of these is a pretty large conversation.

> How is “tokenizing the internet” even beneficial? What value does that add? Who does it empower or help?

The value/utility of every currency is its ability to transfer and maintain value. Tokenizing the web allows for an additional level of granularity that up until this point hasn't been possible.

Put simply, there are a ton of things that people can do on the web that are valuable, but the current systems don't allow in an efficient way for that activity to be rewarded value of any kind. Tokenizing the web means that literally anything that anyone does on the web can be transacted, traded, incentivised. In the current system I can trade my labor for food, recreation, housing, etc. A tokenized web means I can also exchange in comments, posts, answers, activity of any kind and exchange that for anything else of value. It unlocks a whole new economy that up until now has been largely inaccessible.

> What has changed since its inception? What improvements have been made? (If any).

Several hardforks that have moved the blockchain closer to the goal of tokenizing the internet. They involve making the chain cheaper to run, more scalable, and harder to abuse.

> How is it scalable? Will it run into the same issues as we are seeing on other chains if traffic was the same?

I'm not sure technically, but it seems this has been the reason for a lot of the blockchain updates. Doesn't seem like this has been pushed to any extreme yet though.

> DPoS- pros and cons?

This is a huge discussion and it's mostly opinions. I'm too lazy to go down this rabbit hole right now.

> Inflation- inflation is seen universally as “bad” when it’s too high. STEEM inflation is thought to be “high”.. what benefit does the inflation add (if any)? Is it high in comparison? Does that inflation also add value? How?

In order for a currency to be useful people need to be able to get their hands on it, therefore inflation is probably the best solution for this. Almost all cryptocurrencies are inflationary including Bitcoin, ETH, etc. The benefit of the inflation in cryptocurrency is that no central authority has control over the inflation so it's at least predictable. Steem's inflation is high, but it could be managed better by creating deflationary systems(burning Steem) to offset the value dissipation that comes with inflation.

*Opinion: The entire market is small enough that I don't think this should be how we focus on adding value. One app that onboards a million active users which is totally realistic for web and mobile applications, and the inflation won't be a big enough value drain to stop growth. Forcus on building apps that people want to use and the rest of this will fall in line.

> Rewards pool - good or bad? Why? Would Steem exist without it? How?

This is of course another opinion, but I personally think the reward pool is good and without it there wouldn't be much special about Steem. I think reward pool management will be the life or death of each new business that pops up on Steem via SMT's. There needs to be a balance between inflation and deflation and that needs to be directly connected to the business model. I think this is currently the problem with Steem is that the base currency doesn't have a "built in" deflationary mechanism. A good example would be in Steemit took a percentage of the revenue of ads on Steemit.com and burned them. If they don't want to do this I think Steem shouldn't be the PoB distribution currency in the future and that should be handled by an SMT. This is another big and I'm sure controversial topic, but that's the gist of what I think.

Looking forward to other people's thoughts or being yelled at :D

Here are my answers:

>What is Steem? Is the tech superior to say EOS, ETH or bitcoin? If so, how? If it’s not.. why is it needed? 

Steem is a blockchain built for content delivery and social media applications that has Delegated-Proof-of-Stake as its consensus mechanism. It can store text. Text content can stored as JSON objects or as posts, in which case they can be upvoted (or downvoted) by users with their vote weighed by their stake. 65% of the chain's native token inflation goes to authors and curators of posts. Steem is a so-called application specific chain, which means it is not built for running smart contracts or to do computation in general like EOS. Steem is cheaper to run than EOS because computations require RAM, which is expensive. Unlike, EOS or Steem, Bitcoin and Ethereum have Proof-of-Work as the consensus mechanism. In theory, both Bitcoin and Ethereum should be more secure than EOS or Ethereum but they're much more expensive to transact on. The tech is different, not necessarily superior. Superiority depends on the purpose for which it is used.

> Does the chain actually need its own currency?

Yes, it does. Otherwise, all the monetary transactions would have to take place on another chain. If Bitcoin were used, that is, if the rewards were paid in BTC that would be both expensive, slow and cumbersome.

>What are the “fast and free” transactions? Will transactions be free forever? How does that work?

Steem has a three-second block processing target time. There are no direct transaction fees. One needs Resource Credits to transact on the chain. At present, they're tied to the amount of Steem Power one has in one's account. Because Steem Power has monetary value, you could say that you pay for your ability to transact on chain up front but there are no charges for individual transactions. I don't think there will ever be direct transaction fees. This type of model is much more suitable for social media applications than direct fees, which require that the user maintain an adequate balance of liquid funds at all times.

>Is it centralized? 

By cryptocurrency standards, not particularly. Bitcoin is also quite centralized in terms of token distribution.

>What is the distribution look like compared to in the beginning? What makes it “decentralized”?

Steem has a relatively high inflation rate, about 8.5% per year at present. The newly minted tokens tend to end up in the hands of the smaller users because they're distributed mainly to authors and curators.

>What makes it unique? 

The reward pool for authors and curators.

>What are the use cases it offers that are not found elsewhere?

It is best suited for social media and content delivery applications.

>How is “tokenizing the internet” even beneficial? What value does that add? Who does it empower or help?

Tokenization allows for much greater flexibility for the users to take on different roles in the ecosystem. By purchasing or earning STEEM and powering up, a user becomes a curator and an owner and will be able to take part in the governance of the platform. This is much easier to accomplish than through formal agreements in non-blockchain ecosystems. For content creators, this model provides taking ownership of and control over their activities. On legacy platforms, the roles are inflexible. 

>What has changed since its inception? What improvements have been made? (If any).

Steem nodes used to use Chainbase, which was a RAM intensive database and thus expensive to run. That wasn't a problem in the beginning but as Steem is one of the most high-traffic blockchains in existence, something had to be done about the cost to enable scaling. Steemit, Inc, the company that develops the blockchain code, developed a way to move the chain from Chainbase to RocksDB, the latter of which uses cheap hardware (solid state drives) to store the chain but is fast enough at the same time. For this, they had to create an interface called MIRA (Multi-Index RocksDB Adapter) that allows for the transition to RocksDB without rewriting other existing Steem codebase.

Steemit, Inc also developed Hivemind, a database that is not tightly synchronized with the blockchain itself but that is very useful for queries which can be done in SQL. There is no need to query Steem nodes for non-consensus critical information, which can significantly reduce load on Steem nodes by applications.  

Steemit, Inc has gone through many hard forks since its inception where features have been gradually added. In the last hard fork, an improvement on the token distribution model was implemented. It has improved content discovery and rewarding and had a positive impact on the culture of the platform. Higher curation rewards and a separate downvote pool have caused the vote selling industry to practically die off and powerful new curation projects to emerge, many of which are former vote selling bot accounts. 

>How is it scalable? 

Because Steem has DPoS consensus protocol, it is inherently much more scalable than any PoW chain. For its intended use cases, this is a must.

>Will it run into the same issues as we are seeing on other chains if traffic was the same?

Very few other chains have the same volume of traffic.

>DPoS- pros and cons?

The pros have been discussed above. The cons are that DPoS isn't theoretically as secure as PoW but for its use cases, Steem has proven to be secure enough. It has never been hacked and no funds have ever been lost owing to hacking the core blockchain code. User have been careless and had their keys stolen but Steem is prepared for even that. Steem has an account recovery procedure whereby presenting an old master key to a trusted account recovery partner, the master key of an account can be changed and new the key be given to the original owner if the procedure is initiated not longer than 30 days have passed after the thief has changed the master key.

>Inflation- inflation is seen universally as “bad” when it’s too high. STEEM inflation is thought to be “high”.. what benefit does the inflation add (if any)?

Because of the relatively high inflation, STEEM has potential to be put into the hands of a large number of new users thus helping the token distribution decentralize.

>Is it high in comparison? Does that inflation also add value? How?

Bitcoin's rate of inflation is about 4% per annum at present. Steem's rate of inflation is about 8.5%. Some variation to that is caused by the use of a stable coin called Steem Backed Dollar that can be converted to one USD worth of STEEM.

>Rewards pool - good or bad? Why? Would Steem exist without it? How?

The reward pool is quite necessary for Steem to fulfill its value proposition. If it were ever removed, it would have to be replaced with user-defined tokens created that implement the Smart Media Token protocol.

![](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmU28Ky4WXcQWfUVzHRLQizgQNLxZxjoaphdQTP2zfL7Bm/image.png)

Fact. Free downvotes are ruining the platform. Give someone something for free and they'll find a way to abuse it

This kind of informative article in steemit are so lit!

> What makes it unique?

i'm here :)

Great information here!

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Dude pulled out LBRY. Hahaha. A token you spend to pay creators to watch their videos. Revolutionary idea. lol. Id tear this guy a new asshole if i caught the tweet.

The answer to his tweets is very simple.   
The mistakes made by Steemit.inc while being palpable are in the past. Ned left, Stinc is much more sustainable now as a company, SMT test net is live, Communities, Mira, EIP... etc etc. 
In a bear market everyone suffers. No its not bot driven, thats demonstrably false, etc. Not to go in detail since i kind of gave you a response to the comment. Ill see what others have to say in the comments. 

@justineh, We have to agree one thing and that is, everyone cannot understand and respond to **Technical Questions** because some people are here to share their passion and they don't know how the system works and what's happening in the background.

But, your effort is appreciable because any **Steemian** can stuck in this position and **No Response** means **Nothing**. So, definitely i am excited to go through from the **Comment Section**.

Good wishes from my side and stay blessed.

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Great initiative. I think that in order to be effective, those facts must be short and catchy, even if they don't convey the full picture. 

- Wallet addresses as usernames. 
- Free transactions, no fees.
- Fast transactions, 3 seconds transfers.
- Scalable: 100 000 transactions per second (as much as EOS, if not more).
- ROI on holding steempower (currently 2%, can be a lot more if delegating for a return or curating).
- Web app specific blockchain, which will keep it ahead of general smart contract blockchains. 
- Self funded DAO, where Steem Power holders can vote what gets funded. 
- Earn by posting, earn by curating (voting others' posts).
- Create a community on the blockchain, which is independent of the website on which it can be accessed. (You can even create your own website to access it). 
- Launch (Airdrop or ICO) your own coin, with similar characteristics to Steem, with 0 programming experience. 
- Integrate that coin into your community, or your web application (website).
- RC system ensures that an increase in users on steem will result in an increasing demand for Steem Power, causing price increase for Steem.

nice 

@jusineh; good thought to get something like this started to get a conversation going.  I will try to comment on one of the questions, simply because I think it is easier for me to answer:

> Inflation- inflation is seen universally as “bad” when it’s too high. STEEM inflation is thought to be “high”.. what benefit does the inflation add (if any)? Is it high in comparison? Does that inflation also add value? How?

Inflation is not bad ("regular" amount of inflation that is). Now what is "regular" is off course up for debate. But let us hold off on that thought for a second.

`Inflation is a quantitative measure of the rate at which the average price level of a basket of selected goods and services in an economy increases over a period of time.`


"regular" amount of inflation is good for the economy, as it means price of your   brand of car will be slightly higher next year, so may be you like to buy it now as opposed to next year. This simple action stimulates the economy. Make money flows into the system.

If there is no inflation, then we will have deflation, where your brand of car will be cheaper next year, so there is no incentive for you to buy this year, so you better keep your money with you. If everybody does that, then no one buys anything, and that throttles the economy. Classic example is Japan, which is going through a 30 + year of deflationary cycle, which essentially turned off an entire generation away from investing.

So now back to "regular" inflation: Most central bank thinks 2%-3% inflation is healthy for the economy. 15% or higher inflation is termed "hyper-inflation" where value of the currency deflates and value of good & services increases so much that it triggers a downwards circle in the economy. Classic example Venezuela now, and Zimbabwe in not too distant past.

So how is this impact steem? Steem is an economy, but with a caveat that there is no central bank controlling the monetary policy. It can be good or bad at the same time. Its good because lot of us came to crypto as we didn't like the control of the central banks. It can be bad because without governance we can literally run steem to the ground (as we are doing a fairly good job at it so far). 

Therefore, some amount of governance is needed to manage inflation. There has been some efforts. Like burning steem, buying steem from the open market and powering up (thereby increasing the stake)... etc. These are good efforts, some are structural and built-in (like powering up and 13-week power down), while others are deliberate (like burning steem). However, more it needed. If you can't control inflation soon, even more important, if we can't re-direct the inflation towards good content producers, we are doomed.

![](https://i.imgur.com/1IisxxB.png)

✨🙏🏼

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In twitter I prefer to not answer negative people. Some people are growing on the web just by telling shit about projects. I know people who get a lot of followers just by recording negative content about all the projects that they find. Recently one popular guy answered me with something bad about steem and all people know that he is against steem. So, I can't delete his comment in twitter, so I just deleted the tweet. Blocked him and then tweeted again. Why I need to mention him, to make him even more famous. I just ignore such people. If we will care too much about them and keep changing the blockchain again and again to satisfy them, we will not go anywhere. We already have everything we need to onboard the masses and the plans that steem team have is great. SMT's and communities and more applications will be created. Now, our mission is to promote everything we have, that's the most important. We need more exposure. That's why I'm actively promoting in all social media and especially famous ones like TikTok. They really have better traffic and it's easier to grow there. We have to keep being positive. Fud will always exist.

These answers are way tldr,unless of course the masses steem wants to onboard are single, not real adults, unemployed, nerds with the time and energy to put into what basically feels like unpaid work just to learn how this place may or may not function.. Not to mention there's no decent mobile front end..  I'll hang up and let the hype squad not respond to me..

@justineh greetings time without hearing from you, I hope you are well.


I think it's perfect that the community is decentralized although sometimes it seems that it is not, I think that this network is free and that each of its users is a fundamental part of the development from a blogger to someone who delegates through the people who do plagiarism or spam to the directors and founders of this social network thought from another point of view very different from traditional social networks.

The main problem I observe is the fact that steemit is under the shadow of a token that generates value, different points of view give different ways to see the value, here lies the part of our evils.

(By the way I've written to you several times to the discord I need to communicate with you urgently.)

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@justineh please take a look at the guy who downvoted my two posts for no reason. He is just not agree with what I earn. I didn't do anything wrong.