Steemit is a stake weighted vote community. The more stake you have, the more powerful your vote. This means there is strength in unity. A single twig can be broken easily, but a bundle of twigs is very strong. If you feel your not making enough impact by yourself, you may want to consider delegating to a manual curation service that shares your goals and vision. Delegation allows you to band together with others who share your vision and have more impact. Curation rewards are also distributed preferentially to those with higher SteemPower, so joining a manual curation bot may actually increase your curation rewards. So this could be a win for both your wallet and your conscience. This delegation process is a passive investment. I will explain more about delegation as a passive investment below. Delegation is a passive investment available to all Steemit account holders with at least 25 SP.
In order to delegate and earn Steem passively, you must do these things:
- Buy Steem (investment).
- Power-up your Steem to Steem Power, a conversion done in your wallet.
- Go to a website which facilitates delegation, where you loan “the influence” or “voting power” of your Steem Power to a business on the Steem Blockchain and in return you get a portion of their earnings. Once you delegate the process becomes “passive”, the people or businesses you delegate to make money and give you a percentage.
Delegation explained
To understand delegation you need to understand that unlike many other cryptocurrency blockchains which have one coin, the Steem blockchain has three called Steem, Steem Power and SBD. “Influence” or “voting power” on the Steemit platform depends on how much Steem you have “Powered Up” or converted to Steem Power. Steem Power determines how much your vote is worth on the platform. The true beauty of delegation is that you only loan out this influence, you keep the SteemPower and you can take back the “influence” or “voting power” anytime you wish and use your voting power for something else. To underscore this point, when you delegate you will see a negative number in your wallet representing the amount delegated.
The Safety of Delegation
Unlike other investments of cash with delegation your Steem Power never leaves your wallet, but the influence or voting power is loaned. You still have and control your Steem Power. So you can take it back anytime you want by Un-Delegating it. You don’t have to ask permission to take it back and you don’t have to wait for someone to give it back to you. You just Un-delegate it.
Examples of Delegation
When you delegate your Steem Power to a project or business on the Steem blockchain you get a daily or weekly share of the profits. Many people are delegating their Steem Power to manual curation bots or to projects they support to create the version of Steemit they want to see.
How to Delegate
The simplest way I know to delegate is by using Steemworld. I type www.steemworld.org/@shortsegments into my browser and then hit return. Then once my personal page loads I go to the section called delegation and choose who I want to delegate to and how much. Then a box opens and I have a choice of using Steemworld or Steemconnect to delegate my Steempower.
Un-Delegating
When you want to take your Steem Power back you use the same delegation section and replace the amount of Steem Power you delegated with the number zero and you get all your Steem Power back. So if I delegated 100 Steem Power and I wanted to get it back, I would go in and delegate to the same person again, but this time instead of delegating them 100 I would delegate them “0” or zero Steem Power and get all my Steem Power back.
Delegation things you should also know.
You can only delegate Steem Power you own. So you can’t delegate Steem Power you leased or Steem Power someone delegated to you. Once you undelegate Steem Power the project or business you delegated it to loses that Steem Power immediately and can no longer use it. However you won’t be able to use it for 4 days. This is a safety feature to protect the blockchain from people who would abuse this delegation system. You can delegate just a portion of your Steem Power for passive income and use the other portion to reward content creators or people who comment on your posts.
✍🏼 by Shortsegments
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