Sorry you've waited this long for a response!
The Steem mining either late last year or earlier this year swapped over to Equihash and had problems. People kept finding ways to bypass parts of the mining process and the mining queue turned out to be somewhat of a joke. It was dominated by just a couple people, with no chance for anyone else.
So instead of focusing time and effort on improving it, they choose to disable it and go purely DPOS.
I can't justify the decision and many people were against it, but that's what happened.
But does steem power mining exist or that was removed too?
I didn't understand that part about the mining queue, how did the steem mining work?
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All CPU/GPU mining was removed, the only way to generate (or mine) steem power is to become a witness and have users vote for you. I suppose I shouldn't say the only way, you also earn it via posting/curation. Steem Power itself also increases in value over time - sort of like interest, so it's also sort of stake-able.
The way mining used to work was you'd do traditional proof of work mining with a CPU/GPU, and if you found a block, your account was reserved a place within the "mining queue". The mining queue was a pool of accounts that had found a block, and once every 21 blocks, the miner at the top of the list would be allowed to "witness" a block, and then be removed from the mining queue.
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