Nice post. It cleared up a number of things for me. There's just one bit of the puzzle that is still eluding me.

Who is doing the mining?

In BTC, correct me if i'm wrong, the people that successfully crack a hash are awarded a Bitcoin. The cracking itself takes computational power. If the same applies to the steemit blockchain, where steem are produced instead of bitcoin, are the steem produced just given away within the ecosystem? To authors, curators etc? In other words, who's paying the miner's bill?

Thanks in advance.