i am writing this article to make sense of things
writing it out just makes it easier for me and might be of help to other newbies or minnows
I will try to make some sense out of the terms and the STEEMIT platform in general, and understand how to get started with STEEMIT if this is something you’d like to pursue because a lot of people are attracted by the prospect of money but then end up being confused and leave. So here is me trying to avoid just that...
so when we look into our wallet we see some different things that sound almost the same.
First up is:
STEEM – Is the cryptocurrency used to power this whole system. You can buy and sell Steem can be bought and sold on most exchanges and is even rising again now after the spectacular spike last year after the platform launched (chart below). So you can speculate on the price outside the platform. But if you’re not looking to speculate on the price or if you’re not cashing out your Steemit earnings, you don’t need to deal with Steem directly and you can convert it to Steem Power.
Next up in the wallet we have
STEEM POWER 
Steem power – Also known as SP in short, is basically a token symbolizing how much influence you have inside the Steemit platform. If you have a lot of SP your upvotes will count more and will award different authors SP and Steem dollars as well.
Here is where we find all the different species that populate the STEEMIT sea : Whales, Dolphins, Minnows and Plankton
(one of my first articles was about this topic : https://steemit.com/whales/@felander/whales-dolphins-minnows-sharks)
and last but not least:
STEEM DOLLARS 
Steem dollars – This is the currency of the Steemit platform and is referred to as SMD. This is what you send when you upvote a post on Steemit.
The reason it’s called Steem Dollar is because 1 Steem dollar represents the amount of Steem required to reach 1 USD depending on the exchange rate. This is just so that us users have something to compare to. It shows us how much in "real dollar value" we would be giving or receiving. The biggest benefit of keeping your Steem dollars is that they generate 10% interest annually (paid per month) which is meant to keep the people loyal.
additionally and optionally there is:
SAVINGS 
this allows us to make our STEEM and STEEM DOLLARS more secure. It is basically an extra layer of protection in case your account get hacked. Due to the hour block on withdrawal it means that if your active key has been stolen you have this amount of time to use the owner key to prevent your precious STEEM from vanishing into thin air.
i hope this has tought you as much as it has brought me an extra understanding of this wonderful platform we are sharing
if you liked this please upvote, resteem or reply and follow....
thanks and STEEM ON