Why the concept behind Steem is far more interesting than the one behind Bitcoin

In this article, I will try to explain why I believe the concept of Steem goes further than Bitcoin. (nb: sorry for my english, I'm french ;))

About Bitcoin

Before Bitcoin, in our society, money obtained through work is not created, it is transmitted. Money creation was only in the hands of central banks that create money without having to tie it to an actual work. One of the many great conceptual innovations of Bitcoin is for having closely linked the money creation to the concept of work (reward).

However the model of Bitcoin can somehow be perceived as a client-server model: the client is the 'human' who make a transaction, and the server is the miner (not the human behind the miner, but his mining rigs). Although everyone can set a mining rig, we all know that this requires a heavy financial investment.

Even if we have a decentralised peer-to-peer money transfert system, the concept of client-server is still somehow underneath Bitcoin. In other words, Bitcoin brings a certain level of decentralization that we haven't seen before in the history of money and value creation... but not enough.

About Steemit

And here comes Steem and Steemit with a new concept. I notice that people who are discovering Steem & Steemit and who come from the cryptoworld don't understand that posting and curating are the equivalent of mining. While it may be hard to none technical people to understand that bitcoins hold real value, it seems somehow hard too for crypto-believers that we can go beyond a protocol centered around miners.

There are two very interesting aspects in the Steem protocol:

• It humanises the work required for the reward (posting and curating, rather than finding a hash with a certain number of zeros at the beginning)
• It delegates the verification process of the work to another human. rather than embedding it within the protocol. In other words, we are switching from a model where a mining rig provide a work that is veryfied by an algorithm, to a model where a human provides a work that is evaluated by another human.

With Steem and Steemit, miners have a secondary role, and that is great for people. The money transfert system is still peer-to-peer but now even the money creation/distribution can happen in a far more unpredictable way than Bitcoin.