This is going to be a deep dive into the History of Steemit's emergence in the Crypto world, and the emergence of the Crypto world itself so everyone can understand where Steemit is now.
The Birth of an Economy
I first heard about Cryptocurrency around 2008, when a friend of mine mentioned something called the "Silk Road", and I had no idea what either of these things were and had 0 understanding of what a Cryptocurrency is. That may be where you are now, or you may have some experience with Cryptocurrency. A few years later, maybe 2011, there were now news articles about the Silk Road again. After reading an Article, I went to reddit did the whole Onion Browser thing, and used the URL to get to the Silk Road. Where I saw the Bitcoin symbol for the first time. It was being used like a $ Symbol, so I was confused.
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So I highlighted the symbol, and copied it into Google. And a bunch of discussion on a Forum called Bitcointalk.org appeared. So I started reading. I learned about Satoshi Nakamoto, and Cryptocurrency, there was a community goal that was an extension of Satoshi's initial release of the code as Open Source, the goal was that everyone would use Cryptocurrency. It would be a Decentralized currency, not issued as Fiat by a Government. When I first got there, Bitcoins were $5.00 each. Soon after they were $30.00, then $100.00. Some people said it was a Bubble and it would "be affordable again", and this was when everyone traded on MtGox, and trading platform which was an Acronym for "Magic the Gathering Online Exchange", and you had to use a Money order to buy them. Some people began to theorize that Bitcoin was going way up, that one day we would no longer trade Bitcoins, but much smaller segments of the Coins, and these smaller pieces were dubbed "Satoshis".
Then there was Butterfly labs, and the mining farms. It no longer became feas ible to mine with a laptop or number of laptops, and the Graphics cards that had been being used for mining were also being overtaken by the ASICs.
Litecoin was created. Then it was overtaken by ASICs, so Feathercoin and DOGE were created. Eventually came the CryptoNite Algorythm, to counter ASICs and weaken them, Monero is a CryptoNote based coin like this.
Steemit Emerges
Then Ethereum. A Blockchain Cloud, with dApps in place of Apps. Ethereum is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Bitshares was maybe created before this, but is more of an Organizational Blockchain to be used like a cloud to run 1 or a few websites, while Ethereum is more Decentralized. Bitshares hosts Assets on OpenLedger, these are Token Currencies, not mined but created and owned by the creator, to then be distributed like stocks, or coupons, or tickets, etc. These are then traded on the OpenLedger platform like Cryptocurrencies.
Bitsharestalk.org is similar to Bicointalk.org and is kind of where the ICO trend incubated, and was where the Steemit Witnesses came from. Bitshares was created by Dan and Ned, on what they named the Graphene Blockchain. Their Public release of this Blockchain is called OpenLedger Fabric. IBM uses it. And they used Graphene to create Steemit.
Steemit is a Graphene Blockchain, which can and should be copied into any website model. Any Forum or City or Charity, etc, could launch a Graphene Blockchain to run their website, have Witnesses and Nodes, a Currency, and Voting. Any website could reward their users with a currency like STEEM.
About 3 years ago, the Anarcho-Capitalists came to Steemit. They are like Libertarians to the extreme, and believe the Sidewalks and Roads around you should be Private property, to be used by you as the owner sees fit and for whatever fee they deem appropriate. No Public Property, just Anarchy and Capitalism. And Dan and Ned seemed to approve of this, creating an environment that switched from the most profitable posts being those about Steemit.com or STEEM or trading Crypto, to Anarchy Podcasts and Philosophy against Taxing anyone at all ever. It was a big change, and it was not for the better. I then left the platform.
Under New Management
Ned then sold Steemit INC to Justin Sun, who founded TRON. And based on what I read from 7 months ago, Ned must have fully and completely implied that Justin had full and complete control of Steemit, without ever having told him about the situation where all the Witnesses, which can be seen as a Board of Directors (BoD), were Bitshares people.
Steemit is a Delegated Proof of Work Staking Chain. I will break this down.
Delegated = Voting, you Upvote posts, you Vote for Witnesses, etc
Proof of Work = Bitcoin itself is a PoW chain, this simply means there is mining. So Delegated Proof of Work means that the Mining is Voted on. So not everyone can Mine STEEM, only Witnesses who are Voted for can mine STEEM.
Staking = This can be equated with Interest. STEEM has Interest associated with Holding it.
So now Delegated Proof of Work Staking Blockchain makes more sense.
So now that Steemit is "Under New Managment" I wanted to explain where it is now. When Ned sold Steemit INC it started a War with the Witnesses and eventually they forked Steemit. This means a new STEEM currency and Blockchain were created, starting from before Justin owned it, and enough people began using it to make it viable. This Platform and Currency are called HIVE. So now there are basically 2 Steemits.