Check Out This Super Early Q&A With Steemit Founders From April 2016

Today as I was digging around the internet in an attempt to learn more about the origins of Steem, I found this Q&A session on the Bittrex blog. It was quite fascinating because it answered a lot of the lingering questions I had about the early mining of Steem. And in this session, a lot of questions get brought up that have already manifested on the platform.

Here's the link to the Q&A sesssion:

https://bittrex.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/218269848-STEEM-Q-A-with-Ned-and-Bytemaster-04-17-2016

Of particular interest to me was learning how Ned explained the breakdown of Steem holdings.

Here's part of the transcript that goes into detail:

"samsmith [6:06 PM] is it true that 80% was ninja mined?
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=22125.0
if so please help me understand why?
[6:06]
"We have secured ~80% of the initial STEEM via mining. Our plan is to keep 20%, sell 20% to raise money, and give away 40%
to attract users / referrers. "

ned [6:06 PM] the earlier a voter up-votes a post that becomes popular .. the more STEEM the voter earns
[6:06]
Great question @samsmith
[6:07]
Steemit, Inc developed Steem with a specific business plan in mind

ned [6:08 PM] much of our steem will go towards user acquistion .. through a very innovative method

ned [6:08 PM] when we transfer steem to new users .. we transfer it into vested form …..
[6:08]
…..which means no sell pressure :simple_smile:

samsmith [6:09 PM] ok so it was planned to ninja mined 80% so this is part of your plan

ned [6:10 PM] we would have pre-mined ….. but we had good reason not to. see my business partner, co-author and dev’s
post: http://bytemaster.github.io/article/2016/03/27/How-to-Launch-a-Crypto-Currency-Legally-while-Raising-Funds/"

But what was interesting to me, and new information to me was hearing how the Steem holdings would be dispersed:

" Our plan is to keep 20%, sell 20% to raise money, and give away 40% to attract users / referrers."

For some reason, this had escaped me. I could definitely see the need to have a lot of Steem in the Steemit, Inc. account, especially if a huge amount of users showed up and joined.

I'm not going to go into the details of what transpired in the early days, but the topics of conversation are quite interesting considering this happened nearly a year ago. A lot of the fears and questions are already answered. The formation of Steemcleaners has pretty much gotten rid of the issue of spam and plagiarism. However, there are issues that still remain problematic, and the n^2 curve which exacerbates the wealth disparity seems to be one of the biggest problems that prevents growth and new user retention. I'll be looking for @clayop's post that reflects how we, as a group feel about this issue.