STEEM internals #7: Playing with steemtools. STEEM units and units conversion.

Yesterday @furion released steemtools. Before watching the evening movie I started using the tool for a while and I bumped into the Converter module. At this point I switched off the TV and instead of watching the movie I continued to experiment with the tool. The module helped me to better understand relations between STEEM units and I found out how to convert them. It was yet another significant step for me to further understand the STEEM internals and skipping the movie was worth it.

There is not much documentation about the Converter module there yet, but I found out for myself how all the convertions are applied looking at the steemtools source code and also STEEM source code. This post will be therefore all about the STEEM units and the next one about STEEM units convertions. I will include a few examples for each convertion.

A few of you were interested last time in how the actual payment for a post is made. Perhaps this and other steemit posts together will allow me to show it fully in the not too distant future on a real example.

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Definitions

I will need to use a few definitions later to describe conversions and I came up with my own interpretation of a few. I based them partially on the STEEM whitepaper, on other posts and on STEEM source code. If you find better definitions than mine please do not hesitate to add a comment, I will update the post accordingly. Perhaps I also mixed something up. I tried my best but I am not a native speaker and sometimes the definitions may not the best ones available.

STEEM Power and Vests

If you look at your Steemit wallet you will notice that STEEM Power is also described as an influence token and the amount of STEEM Power is displayed in STEEM units. In low level implementation the influence tokens are not STEEM and I discovered that Vests are the real STEEM Power tokens. A Vest relates to a Vesting Share in STEEM source code and has its own symbol. Amount of STEEM Power tokens owned by an account are converted to STEEM amount on the fly taking account the total STEEM supply. The convertion will be explained later in the subsequent post.

I will also relate to a vest in law terms, a quote from wiki:

Vesting is to give an immediately secured right of present or future deployment. One has a vested right to an asset that cannot be taken away by any third party, even though one may not yet possess the asset. When the right, interest, or title to the present or future possession of a legal estate can be transferred to any other party, it is termed a vested interest.

When applied to STEEM I suspect that a Vest which is STEEM Power in this case is an asset held by the account owner. The account owner has a vested right to it and he/she can convert it to STEEM using powering down process and later to STEEM Dollars or any other currency.

If speaking about a unit of a STEEM Power, a 'Vest' or a 'Vesting share' would be a very small fraction of STEEM Power.

You can check the amount of Vesting shares in your account by visiting steemd.com:

https://steemd.com/@your_account_name, e.g. https://steemd.com/@cryptomental

MVests [Mv]

MVests is a unit that makes handling the Vests convenient. MVest = Mega Vest = 1 000 000 Vests (one million Vests). If you visited the link above, you will see that vests amount is given in MVests.

STEEM

As the whitepaper explains, STEEM is the fundamental unit of account on the Steem blockchain. STEEM is what is constantly being mined, and is like printing money by central banks and FED but related to STEEM blockchain. The process of creating the supply is not the same as for the central bank (well I cannot say that for sure as I do not know how the real money is added to the pool). Since the process is computationally intensive and is done by nominated witness STEEM nodes that are also produce STEEM price feed and are rewarded for it.

Increasing STEEM supply triggers inflation, and to offset that automatically 90% of mined STEEM is converted to STEEM Power (Vesting Shares).

STEEM Dollar

STEEM Dollar was designed to stabilize the price of STEEM. The whitepaper explains the concept a lot and the important part to notice is that STEEM Dollar is similar to a fiat currency because it is regarded as a debt. If STEEM is viewed as ownership in the whole supply of STEEM, then a STEEM Dollar can be viewed as debt. STEEM Dollar currency symbol is SBD (SMD in the whitepaper). It is exchageable with other cryptocurrencies on currency exchanges.

STEEM Dollar Median Price

Before I describe STEEM Dollar median price let's remind what is a median value.

I am pasting the Khan Academy explanation for it. Is is just four minutes to describe mean, median and mode. If you never visited Khan Academy before I highly recommend to see it and watch a few videos. In my view Khan Academy can easily replace many university level grade courses free of charge and you can learn it self-paced, whenever you have time.

STEEM price feed is delivered by elected witness nodes. The witness nodes are running steemd daemons with a special configuarion. The witness nodes are regarded to be a trusted member of the STEEM community and promise to run 24/7. Given a set of witnesses, the actual price used for conversions is derived as the median of the price feeds. Taking the median is needed to factor out short term price fluctuations. STEEM uses the median price over a period of one week. The median published feed is sampled every hour on the hour and it is the real 'agreed' price used to convert STEEM into the STEEM Dollar currency.

RShares (Reward Shares)

RShares or Reward Shares are the amount of Vests received as a reward e.g. from a post.

Sometimes in the STEEM source code you can encounter rshares2 or rshares3. This relates to RShares squared and Rshares cubed.

RShares squared:

RShares cubed:

Today I described my definitions for STEEM Units and tomorrow I will descibe STEEM unit convertions with examples in more detail.

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DISCLAIMER: THE INFORMATION IS DELIVERED FREE OF CHARGE AND 'AS IS' WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. I HOPE IT IS ACCURATE AND FREE OF ERRORS AND YOU FIND IT USEFUL.