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oh thanks! How does the up voting work? Does just upvoting generate it all by itself, or do you have a balance that you use to upvote? I think I need to look into this more!

STEEMPOWER. Vested STEEM token gives you voting power in exchange for leaving your coins in the platform. The more STEEMPOWER you have, the more you have the power to direct the reward pool (kind of like bitcoin mining rewards) to a particular user. You also earn from being a good curator. You can learn more in the whitepaper: https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf

Oh man that file wasn't loading for me before, it is now! I'm going to give it a good ol read!

Although the whitepaper is out of date now in many ways. Importantly the rate of inflation is much, much lower than what we started with.

The source of money is basically: we have a pool of Steem which is constantly being filled. It has around 30 days worth of payouts (it cycles fully in 30 days). Every day, posts are paid out from the pool of money created. It's similar in concept to Bitcoin, but instead of only paying miners, we pay all kinds of contributors to the network.

ahh okay that really neat!