Dear Steemians. I'm happy to be back in the engagement challenge this week and it will be my second post in week 3 of season 5. I read the topic by the crypto academy which is "Understanding the Steem Blockchain" and I will love to participate as I share some of the things I understand about the Steem blockchain. Go with me as I share with you today.

There is a name that generalizes the terms the question wants us to answer which means they all belong to the same category, they are all cryptocurrency. Furthermore, all these cryptocurrencies, STEEM, SBD, SP, and TRX have deep relationships with Steemit and these are the things I will be writing about them later.

Steem is the native cryptocurrency of the Steem blockchain that was created in the year 2016. It is a category of cryptocurrency that is a social media-based utility token that is used to participate in the governance of its native blockchain when it's in a staked state. Steem is the first of its kind when it came into the limelight in 2016 and it gingers other projects to also adopt the great innovation.

Furthermore, as we all know the creation of a new cryptocurrency can be through the process known as mining but for Steem, its blockchain uses the Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) to validate data and secure the network and through that new Steem tokens are created when new blocks are added on the blockchain.

The price of Steem at the time I'm writing this post is $0.2299 and its market capitalization is $90,842,697.67 which keeps it at number 248 among thousands of cryptocurrency in the crypto space.

The circulating supply of Steem now is 394,951,699 STEEM. Steem can be earned continually on Steemit as an author or curator, these rewards are from the Reward pool which decreases with the inflation rate as the years go on.

SBD is another cryptocurrency that I will be talking about, it is an abbreviation for Steem-Backed Dollar and a stablecoin. Stablecoins are cryptocurrency assets that have their value pegged to other assets which can be fiat, gold, cryptocurrency, and many others, mostly at the ratio of 1:1 so that they are less volatile.

Furthermore, SBD is a debt asset on the Steem blockchain which is pegged to maintain 1:1 parity with the US dollar. It is created with the Steem blockchain to control inflation, users can earn this asset on Steemit by setting their posts to 50%SBD and 50%SP so that half of their rewards will be paid in SBD and another half in Steem Power. Through this, SBD reduces the creation of more Steem tokens if it remains at $1 but the asset broke the 1:1 peg sometimes ago.

The price of SBD now is at $2.32 and ranked 495 with a market capitalization of $27,105,518.50. The circulating supply of SBD now is 11,706,747 SBD. SBD can not be earned on Steemit for now due to the debt ratio that has broken above 10%.

SP is the abbreviation for Steem Power, SP is also STEEM but not readily available Steem that can be transferred easily, in other words, it is illiquid. SP on the steem blockchain is achieved by powering up liquid Steem assets to have them staked on the network and this gives one influence on the blockchain.

Furthermore, SP is used to participate in the governance of the Steem blockchain, as a network that uses DPoS SP holders can use their stakes on the network to vote for witnesses that are in charge of data validation and security of the blockchain.

SP are also earned by authors on Steemit by setting posts to 100% power up which pays all in SP or 50%/50% where half of the rewards are paid in SP, curators receive all their rewards in SP. SP can also be converted to liquid steem and it takes 4 weeks to complete this, it is not advised for one to power down because you lose the influence on the Steem blockchain.

TRX (TRON) is a cryptocurrency I love so much and it is one of my first loved cryptocurrencies in the space. TRX is the native cryptocurrency of the Tron blockchain that was created in 2017 by Justin Sun and it's a TRC-20 token, Tron blockchain comes with smart contracts functionality that has low gas fee when compared to the Ethereum blockchain that existed before it.

Furthermore, TRX is a utility token that is used to participate in the governance of the Tron blockchain where users can stake or freeze TRX to gain voting power that can be used to vote for Super Representatives on the Tron blockchain. Super representatives are the network validators and using staked TRX to vote them earns someone passive income.

Transfers using TRX are free because it only consumes Bandwidth and Energy but TRX can be burnt if there is no enough bandwidth and energy on one's account.

TRX price at the time I am writing this post is $0.06157 and it is ranked 14 with capitalization that is $5,682,139,668.79 and the circulating supply is 92,284,984,886 TRX. TRX can be earned on Steemit at a 1:1 ratio to the SP earned by authors/curators. I read from the post made by steemitblog some days ago that it would now be 1 SP: 0.5 TRX.

Participation in Governance: Building Sp on the Steem blockchain gives one more influence to take part in decision-making about the future of the platform. Ones SP can be used to vote for the desired witness to serve as the network validator to ensure the right persons are there and some people get rewards from witnesses they have elected into the position.

Voting Power: The size of ones' SP has an impact on the voting given to others which means a well-built Steem Power gives one more voting power and the bigger it is, the valuable the vote from it is. So with Steem power, a user can vote for posts with more value and in that case, her curation rewards also increase.

Vesting Reward: Each time new blocks are added to the Steem blockchain which has 3 seconds block time, new steem tokens are minted and it is distributed to the community at certain percentages. 15% of the new tokens are distributed to the SP holders as rewards for staking Steem on the blockchain, the proportion one earns depends on how much SP the person is holding so it pays to hold more SP.

Independence: Building ones SP on the Steem blockchain helps to have the power to support her community which lessens the burden on the top curators. With a large SP size, community members can come together and reward others which makes the community to be independent in the future.

Curation is a very popular word on the Steem blockchain and importantly on its first DApp, Steemit. Some people believed that curation is all about voting posts but it goes beyond that. Curation on the Steem blockchain is something that has many things that make it up before it can be termed that word. And some of the things curation passes through are:

Curation must follow the aforementioned process which starts from finding content, read it carefully, checking for abuses, ascertaining its valuable then voting on it and can also Resteem. If the post contains abuses, during curation one can also downvote it. You can see that this goes beyond random votes and in this way, it will satisfy the Proof of Brain (PoB). People that perform curation on Steem are called curators.

Self-Voting is the process of voting on your own posts published on Steemit, it is a very bad practice and should be discouraged in every way. The practice of self-voting does not follow the Proof of Brain (PoB) which is a model of rewards on Steem. A user cannot judge herself, it should be done by others that find her post valuable so self-voting is not working in line with real curation.

Self-voting is bad and people that are involved in it should discontinue such behavior because it's bad.

The voting window can be explained as the time a post stays active before it becomes expired on the Steem blockchain. We all know that posts on Steemit payout after 7 days and during that period, users can still vote on the posts to add value. Furthermore, not every hour of the 7 days adds full value to the post which means certain percentages of rewards can still return to the reward pool if users vote at a time within the 7 days.

Furthermore, the useful period where 100% rewards of a vote on a post go to the article is between 5 mins and 6 days 12 hrs. What this means is that voting on a post between 0 - 5 minutes and after 6 days 12hrs would return some rewards to the pool. How the reward is distributed based on the time of voting are:

The window where the rewards return to the reward pool is known as reverse auction window. When one vote at 6 days 12 hrs, 100% rewards still go to the votes and it depletes after to 75%, 50%, 25% then to 0 at 7 days. So 0 and 7 days would add no value to a post.

The post I am using for this is an expired one in the academy. Before I started, my account voting mana was 92.55% and the post has $46.59 on it.

I voted at 100% for the post, my observation after that was that the vote doesn't add to the value and it doesn't consume my voting mana.

I am using an active post in the academy for this also. My voting mana was 92.89% before the upvote and the post has $55.74 on it.

Furthermore, I voted at 100% on the post and the value pending payout turns to $55.94, and my voting mana reduced to 91.04%, about 2% that depletes with 100% upvote has followed my vote on the post.

The simple observation is that expired posts can not receive more value and such votes have no impact on the voting mana. Also, active posts can still receive votes that will add to the payout value and deplete the voting mana depending on the voting percentage.

Voting value that weighs according to the size of the SP, the rich get richer in the process, and whales maximize their position to get more curation rewards while small users battles for a place. But I believe everyone has their time, new whales can also arise from small stakeholders in the future.

The Steem blockchain is the first of its kind that is social media-based to preserve value for original content owners and also incentivize them. It uses the DPoS consensus algorithm that allows the stakeholders to participate in the governance of the network.

Steemit is the first DApp built on top of the Steem blockchain where users can write original content and earn tokens like Steem, SBD, SP, and TRX. Furthermore, posts on Steemit expire after 7 days when no value can be added to it again, within that 7 days there is the period that is termed the reverse auction period which I have discussed in my post. I am very happy to share my knowledge again in the academy's contest.