A graphic to help explain Steem and where the money comes from

Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself in the position of explaining what Steem is and how it works to a lot of people who are unfamiliar with it - which is a great thing! I am also planning to give a talk about Steem at the next Philadelphia SteemIt meetup which is currently scheduled to be held on Tuesday, February 13th. A big thanks to @hypnopreneur for setting that up!

One question that always comes up (which I know has been answered on here thousands of times) is “where does the money come from?”. I’ve now answered this question probably a hundred times myself, and it occurred to me recently that it would be helpful to have a graphic that illustrates what I am trying to explain.

So here’s what I came up with:

I don’t intend for this to be completely self-explanatory, but rather as an aide to help me explain the concept and hopefully lead into more questions and a further discussion.

I considered it very important to start with the government printing dollars. Even though most people know that there is inflation and understand that the government prints money, for some reason it seems different or unusual to them when in the context of cryptocurrencies.

I’m guessing this is because you don’t really see or hear about the government printing money for the most part since it happens behind the scenes and you don’t see where that money goes. All the more reason the transparent and clearly defined token creation process in cryptos is far preferable, which I hope this graphic also helps to highlight.

So my answer to the question of “where does the money come from?” is that Steem, like every other currency, has inflation - meaning new money is created on a regular basis. New USD goes to banks, new Bitcoin/Ether/etc goes to miners, but new Steem mostly goes directly to the content authors and curators who provide value to the platform.

Though it does have some issues and drawbacks, in my opinion it’s clearly the best option out of the three presented systems for distribution of new money.

Anyway, I have yet to show this graphic to anyone except you guys, but as I mentioned I plan to use it as a visual aid when explaining Steem and the concept of where the rewards come from. I’m very interested to know what the Steem community thinks of it. Let me know in the comments!

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