On yours.network it's pretty clear where the money comes from: every curator pays to curate, and their payment is spread between the post's author and the earlier curators of that post.
What I'm less clear about is where the money comes from here, on Steemit. I see many posts earning over $1000. Where is that value coming from? Curators don't pay to curate. So who is paying, and why? It's a zero-sum game, and some content creators are taking out thousands of dollars. Who is putting in those thousands of dollars, and what is their motivation for doing so? Will they continue to do so?
Edit: this account was given to me by the guy who registered it. I run just-dice.com, and usually post under the account 'dooglus' here. I forgot to log out of 'just-dice' after logging in to change the password.
@just-dice Interesting insight but the money from steemit comes from the same place the money for bitcoin does and the money for the US Dollar does. We make it so by the sheer force of our combined will.
The miners mine steem. Instead of the miner who finds a block getting the entire block reward, a certain amount is set aside in a fixed pool that is distributed to each person who participates each day based on an algorithm that is driven by upvotes and commentary scoring weighted by a proof of stake like system.
Keep in mind though, that even though you might see a $10,000 post. That poster only got $7,500 because 25% goes to the people who curated (upvoted) the content. Also he or she only walks out the door with $3750 of it because half is SBD (steem backed dollars) which can be transfered, sold or converted and the other half is sunk back in as steem power or SP. This gives them more power to curate better content.
The price of steem is driven quite literally by a sort of personal vanity. People want power, they want respect. Here you have the option of either working or buying that power and respect. You just accumulate steem, convert it to steem power and suddenly, you are the man in charge. You get to call the shots as to what sees the front page or not.
This has it's darkside too, but on the whole the system is working. Most people aren't dumping their SBD on the open market and SP cannot be sold. You can only "power down", and powering down is a 2 year process that starts from the day you start doing it. This means you are effectively lending steem to the platform and in exchange you get an interest payment in steem that offsets the dilution effect of new steem being minted.
As new users come to the platform, they will want prestige and power. They will want their voice to be heard, and they will purchase steem on the open market to do so. Furthermore, an entire economic ecosystem is being built around SBD since it is effectively always $1 USD worth of steem regardless of the dollar price of steem at the time. This is about as safe a bet as you can ask for. The pegging mechanism is essentially a smart contract run on the blockchain that is a contract for difference and updated and adjusted automatically on the fly with each block found. Ergo, there is no need for steemit to maintain large reserves like their would be with a pegging mechanism like Tether uses. And there is no need for a bot to try and buy or sell steem on the open market in order to try and maintain the peg like there is with most other attempts to market peg a crypto.
The closest thing to SBD is bitUSD, in terms of pegging because they are from the same team and you can see on coinmarketcap that bitUSD has been pretty stable for quite sometime for the same reasons SBD will stablize again soon.
Ok I hope that answers your questions about "where the money comes from". It comes from the value of our content and the desire for others to come participate with us to earn money and drive the conversation where they want to.
This is literally the best explanation to the question "where does the money come from?" I've seen yet!
You should write an article about it if you haven't already.
First of all, thank you for your input, I really did hope for and intend for some people to come out and either play devils advocate or sincerely advocate for yours so thanks for being that guy who actually contributes to the discussion.
I don't necessarily disagree with you on the point of 'where is the money coming from?' I just think that the fact that steemit is essentially free to use is going to make it more used than yours independent of the actual merit of the projects from whatever an objective view would be, because people are more likely to be somewhere with less barriers to entry.
This steemit pretty simple , lets say we doing cloud mining , if you post contents some people will upvote your post , if whales upvote your post then your mining power increasing bigger .the more people upvote your post the bigger amount of rewards you get , just like 12 hours mining power . i hope this comment will make you little clear.
But better get whale to upvote your post.
This is block chain thingy everythjng must connect to each other i think .
Sorry for my bad english .