# Hello World!

Hi everyone, I just joined the SteemIt community yesterday and the welcome guide says I should introduce myself, so here goes...

My name is Matt and I live in sunny Philadelphia, PA with my wife and 5 year old son.

![IMG_4505.JPG](https://steemitimages.com/DQmebNVR8yAoSxKQ7p8W1ZZhemM99tuFHu4VZLC4zhLiTNH/IMG_4505.JPG)

I'm a software developer / manager by day and by night...well i have a 5 year old so i'm usually in bed by 10! Anyway, I first read about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency about 6 years ago and started mining it on my home computer. At that time you could mine a good bit of coin on a standard desktop pretty easily but each coin was only worth a few bucks and I had a lot of other stuff going on in my life so I stopped mining and kind of just forgot about it all until recently...FACEPALM!

Now with all the hype around cryptocurrencies they could be ignored no longer! I am especially interested in understanding all of the unique applications that the blockchain can provide which has led me here. For the past couple days I have immersed myself in the literature about SteemIt. I read through the white paper and while I can't say I really understood all of it I definitely feel this concept has very big potential.

With that in mind I have a few questions which I'm hoping the SteemIt community can help answer to further my understanding of the technology, it's viability into the future, and ultimately help me decide whether or not it's a good investment:

1. I'm unclear about the plan for inflation. Initially it seemed like the plan was for 100% inflation each year but now i've seen that it's set to about 9.5% and decreases by about 0.5% every year - Can anyone shed some light on that and explain how the desired inflation rate is achieved?

2. I'm unclear about the interest rates on Steem Power and Steem Dollars - in the white paper it says that both will pay interest (I forget the exact amounts) but in the "Wallet" page everything says "collecting 0% APR". I would like to understand what the plan is for interest payments on these.

3. There seems to be a lot of bots running on the platform and many of them seem to be "gaming" the system. For example things like @randomwhale, @booster, or @minnowhelper seem to be bot platforms where authors can pay to get their content promoted. 4 out of the 5 comments on the first SteemIt post that I read were from bots. It seems to me like this goes very much against the goals of this community - I don't consider a bunch of bot-comments or posts that paid to be up-voted by whale voting bots to be "curated content". I admit that I am very new to this and may not be fully understanding everything so I would very much appreciate some insight from more experienced members of the community about the prevalence of these bots.

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide! Overall I'm trying to get a feeling for whether or not the SteemIt platform can grow and become mainstream one day - please share your thoughts in the comments!