Thinking about steem energy ( AKA steem power) differently
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Steem power is translated to efforts made by the swarm. It's our investment of time and energy associated with our interactions with Steemit platform. Here is the quintessential problem associated with Steemit right now and is also a major point. This can be solved easily. Otherwise I wouldn't write about it. The community needs to come together and solve this major pain point if Steemit is to succeed long term. This write-up won’t be long. No one reads long posts, people like to vote posts that looks long without ever reading it. They assume that it contains thoughtful contents and they upvote it. That’s just wrong, superficial and it's being greedy. So those guilty as charged need to stop!  So here is a critical issue and a major pain point from the point of view of the users. Let me lead by the problem.

Problem definition
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So yesterday I made a decent and a reasonable post where I wanted people to explain to me how the estimated dollars is calculated. This is a critical issue that appears to be felt by many steemians. It’s fair.
https://s6.postimg.org/erlzcvlpt/Otherissueson_paymenbt.jpg

A new steemit user sent in 3.4 bitcoins, based on the value of the bitcoins which is worth 3.4*640 = $2176, the estimated value should have been at the least the value of the bitcoins. This wasn’t so. Few things could have happened.

1.	Since the user purchased this from steemit and since blocktrade facilitates the trade, it’s possible that he got stuck with a wrong end of an arbitrage and potentially lost huge sum of money. 
2.	Steemit is just using a wrong price signal to calculate this estimated value function
either way the issue is critical or it bothers significant numbers of people. Then came the upvotes. As shown on the attached picture below. The post that I made received 18 votes. That’s a lot of votes from the community. However the dollar earned for this post was a meager $0.01 cents even after 24 hours. That’s pitiful. The reason this occurs is that I didn't get a upvote from a whale. A centralized rich guy/gal sitting on their chair and probably dreaming up that house in the Bahamas. Ok. I digress. This is a real issue. Unless otherwise I get voted by a whale, this is going nowhere. This leads to frustrations.
https://s6.postimg.org/rt7o2qa41/18_votes_and_only_get_1_cent.jpg

I could go beg in the street, no thoughts involved, just extend my hands and I could get 0.01 cents. I am not expressing my frustrations with steemit. The community is new and it has lots of kinks to work out, but mindfulness of key issues regarding user pain points are extremely important.
https://s6.postimg.org/6xldrhdwx/modplayboy_0_610x405.jpg


The dollars that shows in the post is a result of the steempower by those who voted this content. That is clearly how this is calculated. This means that most of these 18 users did not have any steempower. It's understandable as to why that is. In signing up, they have very little steem power. I had to spend 3K just to buy 700 steem power points. That’s a lot of money to throw at the system and not everyone is going to be able to do this. In fact I suspect that less than 1% of the new users are willing to take that kind of risk. This therefore is going to be a major pain point for steemit users for foreseeable future and something needs to be done about it.

Steem power  and the poorest user class
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I have heard elsewhere that the creators of steemit were powering down in order to distribute steem tokens. This is heroic and wise.  I do not know if that was a rumor. If they are powering down, that’s a great idea and will be viewed as altruistic action by historians in the future. The steem power needs to be distributed to the swarm. Their votes need to have power. High number of votes by poor steemians are extremely valuable.  Ideally, whether a post is good or not should be dictated by the wisdom of the crowd. The crowd therefore need to have their steem power raised. The cost of steem tokens is detrimental for the needed mass adoption. This, therefore, needs to be mitigated. 

Conclusion
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We are still in the beta stage. Therefore, we need to keep an open mind towards the possible future growth of the platform with a very solid footing.  If the steemians community at large is rich (have high steem power), then the post they support will receive decent tips which will then encourage them to post even further and the cyclic support mechanism is established. This is what’s needed if steemit wants to reach status far superior to facebook, reddit etc.