When I first found Ethereum and Steem, I didn't know a lot about either one.

I suppose the reason I'm on Steemit is because it is a social network and no other ones like it existed last year. Well, the payouts were pretty important. But when I was first learning about both systems, I often wondered why @dantheman didn't build a Dapp on top of the Ethereum network. After all, Ethereum is bigger and also has a lot of other Dapps already created for it.

Why did Dan Larimer decide to create an entirely new system?

During my research of Ethereum and Steem, I came across a video which shows Dan Larimer asking a lot of questions to Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum. Dan asks a lot of tough questions and to me, it appeared that Vitalik didn't have really solid answers to them. It gets pretty technical, but the scalability issue was one thing I felt Vitalik never properly answered.

So, if you've never seen this video, it's worth looking at to see some fundamental differences between Ethereum and Steem. If you are skilled in explaining the nuances of this Q & A session, let your comments flow down below:

ps- Tonight I just listened to a SteemSpeak episode where @fyrstikken asks @sneak some interesting questions. From that episode I learned that Steemit is going to be putting a lot of focus and energy into building Steemit mobile apps that are easy to use. Consdering mobile app usage eclipsed desktop activity worldwide, that's a good move.

pss- in case you ever wondered what a 'Merkle tree' is here you go, straight from Wikipedia:

In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every non-leaf node is labelled with the hash of the labels or values (in case of leaves) of its child nodes. Hash trees allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of large data structures. Hash trees are a generalization of hash lists and hash chains.

Demonstrating that a leaf node is a part of the given hash tree requires processing an amount of data proportional to the logarithm of the number of nodes of the tree;[1] this contrasts with hash lists, where the amount is proportional to the number of nodes.