A homeless man can afford to buy an RV thanks to a popular blog post . A woman earns a year’s salary from a YouTube makeup tutorial . An African writer starts with three hours of electricity per day and ends with over $40,000 dollars . These are some of the striking and somewhat implausible-sounding stories to have emerged during the first fully operational month of Steemit, a forum-style platform that rewards community content and curation with cryptocurrency payouts, and where—for the moment at least—users who hit the goldmine of a viral post can see up to five-figure payouts. (Here I should include a journalistic disclosure: a post on the site in which I appealed for sources for this story earned a total value of over $800, of which I have currently withdrawn $100.) But as with any new cryptocurrency, there are key questions over stability, sustainability, and underlying motivation. As it stands, the bulk of the site is made up of quickly-written, poorly-researched content, some of which is remunerated into the thousands of dollars. At the same time, critics have raised concerns over both the distribution of the currency and the business model of the platform, questioning the huge sums accrued by early adopters and in some cases alleging a scam dependent on new investment to remain afloat. The principle of the Steemit platform and its three value tokens—Steem, Steem Power, and Steem Dollars—is outlined in the Steem Whitepaper , written by the founders and lead developers, which describes it as “the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward an unbounded number of individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.” In the simplest explanation, every year, approximately 10 percent of the total value of the currency is allocated to content finders and creators by votes […]
