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Since I joined steemit about 28 days ago I have carefully watched the system and it's operation wow quite fascinating how things happen around here. I barely understand this complex economic system yeah its more like an economic system than a social media in my view.
So I started making research, asking questions paying attention to every detail on steemit. Steem power, steem, and steem dollar were all confusing at first but for the last two it wasn't difficult coming to terms with after all but then there was steem power.
All I did understand about steem power was that with a high steem power when you upvote a post you help the post earn more but even I knew there was more to this, that can't be the sole purpose of steeem power hence why is it so important?

WHAT DOES STEEM POWER REALLY DO?

When you go to your wallet section on steemit the first line just below the steem power section reads

Influence tokens which give you more control over post payouts and allow you to earn on curation rewards.

What does this even mean? I had read this over and over with almost zero understanding, I even talked to a friend who said she wants to power up and am like why do you want to power up not because i don't think it was necessary to do that but because I was hungry for information I needed understanding of the above statement.
Finally after reading the statement over and over plus other research I have been making it clicked i finally understood what that line meant.

So now back to the question what does steem power really do? to completely answer this question I would like to break the above statement into two and explain so that we can understand it.

It's an influence token which gives you control over post payouts.

Now look at that statement its quite simple and its what i mentioned earlier, steem power gives you control over post payout that means you influence the payout of a post when you upvote a post.
you must have noticed that when some people upvote your post the payout you get from those post is quite higher compared to when they don't or compared to others, that is because they have high steem power so they greatly influence your post payout.
Now the second part of the statement

It allows you to earn on curation rewards.

This can be tricky especially for newbies i mean not until few days ago i didn't understand this but here we go.
First I would like to point out that on every post made on steemit, its payout no matter how huge or small it is divided into two in the ratio 70 : 30, now listen to this carefully, for those who have difficulty calculating their potential earnings at the end of the day lol now I just sounded like this is Bet9ja don't mind me, so as i was saying 70% of post payout goes to the author i.e the writer of the post its called author's reward, while 30% is shared among those who upvote and comment on a post this is called curation reward and trust me the amount you earn on curation rewards depends on how high your steem power is. At this point you don't need any more telling on the need to acquire steem power its very important but this isn't all let's go on.

COMPOUNDING STEEM POWER

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Have you seen the STEEM White Paper, it has this to say about steem power

Because Steem wants to encourage long-term growth, it is hardwired to allocate 9 STEEM to Steem Power (SP) stakeholders for every 1 STEEM it creates to fund growth through contribution incentives. Over time this drives the ratio of the total STEEM value of Steem Power balances to the total of STEEM balances toward 9:1 . (It seems likely that the ratio will be somewhat greater than 9:1 due to continued net Powering Up of the newly printed STEEM.) It also means that long-term holders are almost completely protected from the dilution used to fund growth.

This means that by accumulating reasonable amount of steem power you increase your steem power minutes by minutes.

POWERING UP AND POWERING DOWN

powering up is the process of converting steem to steem power. Aside the steem power you earn from your activities on steemit like making post, upvoting, commenting and the steem power you get as a stalkholder which depends on the amount of steem power you already have, powering up is the best way to increase your steem power.
To power up if you don't already have steem you can purchase steem using blocktrades or have a fellow steemian send to you and you pay for it. So having purchased steem go to your wallet section where you see steem click on it to drop down then you would see power up use this to convert the amount of steem you want to steem power. The process of powering up is an immediate transfer of steem to steem power in the ratio 1 : 1 whereas powering down is the process of converting steem power to steem which can be sold to earn actual cash, power down unlike powering up it isn't an immediate transfer but takes a total of 52 days 13 weeks for power down to complete and the process can be stopped at anytime.

I think we all need to power up for those of us who haven't done so this gives us great influence on steemit which would in turn translate to more payouts on steemit, it's very important to us and our steemit community let's do this!