I have been teaching @outofthematrix this also... everybody needs to know, especially minnows! This is not just for people with large stakes. Because your growth is severely stunted if you don't do this... you'll always be a minnow. #letsgrowblurt

As you know, Blurt differs from traditional blog sites in that micropayments of cryptocurrency are used to incentivize high quality content. Every vote you make costs you a fee, generates a payout for the recipient, and makes the content more visible/viral. Voting is our main power on this blockchain (posts, comments, and muting are the others), so voting properly is vital.

The size of your vote is determined by 2 variables. You want your vote as high as possible, so you want these variables as high as possible:

• how much BLURT Power you have
• your Voting Power (the popup shows your current Voting Power % before you finalize each vote)

You already know how to get more BP.... power up your BLURT. Buy more and earn more, then power up. The more money you have invested in the platform, the more powerful you are and the more you count. (Like it or not that's how it works.) They don't call it "powering up" for nothing!

As for getting higher Voting Power, it's free, you just have to wait. It increases at a rate of 20% per day (just under 1% per hour). Each full vote (if you give 100% of your vote) costs 2% of your Voting Power. It takes 2.4 hours for your Voting Power to recover after giving a full vote. So if you're at 100% Voting Power, and you give somebody a full upvote, you'll then be at 98%. You can vote again right away, going down to 96%, or you can pause a couple hours and let your Power recover. There's some strategy involved.

If you're at 100%, all of your upvote counts toward the payout. But if you're at 90%, only 90% of your upvote will count, and the other 10% is lost (burned/deleted). If you're at 50%, you're throwing away half of all your upvotes. And so on. The other day when I talked to @outofthematrix about it, he was wasting almost his entire vote! Hopefully he has recovered to nearly full by now, through abstaining (or only giving out fractions of a full vote).

Once your Voting Power gets back to 100%, it can't get any higher, so at that point you do need to find something to vote on. In an ideal world, you'd vote exactly at 99.99% Voting Power every time, but obviously we can't do that, so just do your best. I try and keep mine about 90% at all times.

When I'm at 100%, if I give out full votes, they're worth about 20 BLURT each. That's because I have 241k BP. You have about 75k, so once you're at full Power your full votes will be about 6 BLURT (15 cents). That means you can give out 1.5 USD every day. And rising. How fast that rises depends on how efficient you are with curation, among other things. Even at your level, not throwing away your votes is a good idea! You (and those around you on the blockchain) will grow faster that way.

Votes are a kind of "moral support" too, you're definitely right.