Hi Steemit, I'm Nick.
I'm sitting here making my first post on Steemit at a friend's house after he talked to me about his posting on Steemit and how some of his articles made a few hundred dollars just for being posted here. I've upvoted a few people on the front page at random as a test and their money went up by a few cents, but I didn't pay anything to Steemit.
My friend tells me that money is coming from value on the network but surely you can't just make that money out of thin air? Are the creators of this place paying people out of their pockets?
Why isn't everyone doing this if it's that simple? Where is the catch? Why doesn't anyone bail with all this free money?
Welcome
Many try, few succeed.
It is somewhere between your keyboard and your chair.
They can't, a huge portion of it is bound as "Steem Power", which takes 52 weeks on average (104 weeks in total) to convert into another currency.