@sircork made a meme. It's been in my head since I saw it. Steemit is without a doubt an awesome platform, but there's also a rather steep learning curve to climb in order to figure this place out. I thought I'd take a quick stab at putting this stuff all in one place. It's like your steemit vocab list.
Functional Vocabulary
Blockchain: A type of digital ledger. It keeps track of all transactions. Think of making an excel sheet and every 3 seconds you hit save and it adds the snap shot of changes as a new block to the chain. The chain contains all information that's ever happened. Steemit.com and websites like it are able to view and retrieve information from the chain in an easily digestible format.
Witness: Technically it's a server that helps assemble the blockchain. It's also a person. The witnesses are elected members of the community. The server settings effect things like average blocksize, percent interest on SBDs, and the witnesses publish prices used to calculate values and earnings by backend of the blockchain. Many witnesses focus on the technical end of the blockchain. They may add new features and sister websites to use the blockchain in novel ways. Many witnesses also think of themselves having a social purpose helping new members, advocating for the community, or explaining what all this stuff is.
Steemit. Steemit is a company that runs the steemit.com website. It was founded by @ned and @dan. @dan has since left and is now managed by @ned. There are a fairly large number of developers that work to keep the website improving and adding new features to the steemit.com interface. Steemit is currently working on their next set of goals, which is to increase the rate at which this ecosystem can onboard new members.
Steem: Steem is a unit of currency. It's created by the Steemit Blockchain. The value fluctuates so, it's hard to compare it to something. It's like owning a volatile stock that goes up and down in vale, but as of right now hovers between $1-2/steem.
Steem Power: If you own steem you can convert it into Steem Power. This is like owning and activating a stock in a company. You now own X% of the output of the blockchain and can exert some control over it. If you have high steem power your upvotes are worth more.
Steem Backed Dollars (SBDs): This is a measurement of debt to be paid by the blockchain. The percent interest fluctuates, but is set by the witnesses, which they use to ensure it stays worth at least $1.
Crypto Currency- These come in many fashions, but largely they are digital currency alternatives to government issued debt based notes. The crypto is in reference to many of them using cryptography as a method to secure interactions and transfer of digital currencies.
Exchange: Much like a stock exchange you can exchange crypto currencies for one another. Just like you can sell apple stocks to purchase IBM you can buy and trade bitcoins for litecoins or steem. Exchanges are marketplaces where people buy and sell the difference currencies for one another. A very common exchange is bittrex.
Coin: The crypto currencies usually refer to themselves as coins. Bitcoin is an example. There is also Litecoin and Dogecoin. These are not printed metal coins, but digital currency that use the term coin to loosely describe it's association to money.
Token: Token is another commenly used term for a digital currency or thing of value. You can think of them like poker chips representing value.
Wallet: A wallet is a program that stores the value of one or more cryptocurrencies. You typically have an address that is either a name in the case of Steemit or a long string of numbers and letters in the case of Bitcoin. If you want to buy, sell, or transfer your currency it likely is going into and out of one or more wallets. You can think of these as the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank account.
Transfer: Just like handing you a $5 dollar bill I can transfer value digitally too. This can be like wiring money in the banking world where you send it from one account to another. A transfer is how you bring digital currency from one wallet to another.
Fiat Currency: Fiat generally means backed by nothing. Government currencies used to be backed by gold, but in the 1970s Nixon took america off of the gold standard. Now the common understanding is that US Dollars are backed by nothing. Thus they are called fiat currencies. People are often concerned about infinite inflation when currencies can be printed without any limit like the amount of physical gold in the world.
Distribution: People referencing this are generally speaking about the percent ownership of steem by it's members. Currently steemit has a rather slanted distribution with the top 1% of steem holders owning 93% of the steem.
Upvote: If you like a story you can upvote it. This not only shows the author that you like their content, but it also put some rewards towards their posts
Resteem: This is similar to the share function on facebook. You are able to share stories from authors you have enjoyed reading to your follower list when you click the resteem option.
voting power: You have a maximum voting power of 100%. Every time you vote it slowly drains. Every day it comes back by 20%. A typical maximum vote drains 2% of your remaining voting power. So, a max vote at 100% voting power will remove 2% of your voting power. A max vote at 50% of your voting power will only remove 1% of your voting power because it's removing the power based on what you have left.
The steemit anology is a pool that's constantly being filled by rain and you are manually draining it by removing bucket loads at a time. The rain is teh 20% that refills teh pool every day. Your votes are teh bucketloads coming out of the remaining water.
Followers: People that like your stories have the option to click the follow button and subscribe to your articles. Every time you publish your followers will automatically receive the story.
Slang
Steemes: The combination of the word Steem and meme. These can be memes about steem or simply memes created and posted to steemit.
Whales, Dolphins, Minnows, Redfish: These fish analogies typically reference the amount of wealth someone has. While the terms are used broadly across the cryptocurrency space on Steemit the ranges go like this:
Redfish: 0-1000SP
Minnow: 0-5000 SP
Dolphin: 5000-50000
Whale: 50000+ SP
Whale balz: a vulgar reference to the amount of steem an account holder posses.
How to profit on Steemit
The fastest advice I have for you is that different activities will represent a larger portion of your income depending on how much SP you have. I generally encourage folks to get 300 followers before starting to concentrate more heavily on authoring if their intent is simply growth. In general the advice goes like this-
Minnows comment, dolphins author, whales curate
Commenting: You can add feedback on every article. These are called comments.
Author: When you write a new post and publish that to the world that's considered authoring
Curate: When you spend a lot of time upvoting posts and comments that's consider commenting. People whale accounts can make money curating it's effectively the fastest wealth generator for them.