I like to look at numbers and work out what they might mean. I am terrible at playing around with numbers though but for my intents and purposes, accuracy is not as important as the image it gives me.
Where is your head at?
This is the current reward pool:
This is what it was 2 days ago:
What that means is in the last 2 days, the reward pool has increased ~6 percent. However, it is supposedly normally hovering around ~750K STEEM which means in total the pool is ~30 percent fuller than normal. This is why all the post values are increasing in price and, the vote values are inflated as they need to be larger to drain the pool. 12 hours ago when I posted I mentioned this also and it was 982,903 STEEM in the pool which means it is growing almost 700 STEEM per hour.
Why the hell is my feed still running in slow motion??
Essentially, to bring the pool back into its normal range, everyone's votes are carrying about 30% extra weight behind them than they should at the 81c price. What this means is that every vote cast at the moment has the ability to draw 30% more from the pool than it normally would at that price.
What this means is that if under normal conditions a vote had a value of 10 dollars, it is currently around 13. This means that casting that vote distribute 3 dollar more from the pool. It will remain higher until the pool returns to its equilibrium point.
leaving curation out of it for simplicity (I told you it is the picture that matters, not accuracy):
A 10 dollar vote payout at 50/50 is: 5 SBD / ~6.25 STEEM
If converting the SBD on the internal market it will buy the same in STEEM making the post value 12.5 Steem. Easy.
But, the 13 dollar vote at 50/50 is 6.5 SBD / 8.125 STEEM
Again, the same can be bought internally making the post a 16.25 STEEM Post.
This means that a post gets almost 4 STEEM more or ~30 percent more STEEM.
So again... why the hell is my feed slow??
30% more Steem is on offer and people aren't posting. I don't mind, nor does anyone else who understands that the price of STEEM is irrelevant until you sell. Thos who are stackiing, this is a brilliant opportunity *especially since STEEM price is so low as it means that the extra SBD paid out on posts buys even more Steem.
Throwing votes and comment curation
I was at Steemworld.com and noticed this:
I have just gone over 40,000 votes cast on the platform which is pretty amazing really considering I am a manual caster. Part of the reason it is so high is because I vote on a lot of comments I receive which has created a bad habit for HF20.
I have never really worried too much about curation rewards, especially on comments so I would always vote as they came in if I could. What this meant was that that my curation portion of the vote would go to the author which I was happy with. Now though, some portion of the curation goes to the pool instead if voted before 15 minutes, not to the person who left a comment.
Out of habit, I keep forgetting and voting and although it goes back into the pool, I don't really like the idea of not being able to place that value myself and, the bots do not make this mistake which means they will have more to distribute amongst themselves. So, I have to try and remember to vote after the 15 minutes. What this means though is that I will take more curation on it and the author will get less value so when possible, I will increase my percentage a little when I think it is suitable to do so. That way, the comment still gets rewarded similar values to before.
Kick in the Bulls
The more I think about the possibilities that are potentially available through RCs combined with SMTs the more bullish I become on Steem as it allows for a the platform to not only scale but keep the costs for new users FREE once the infrastructure to do so is in place.
I have always suggested that people power up but this is perhaps more important for small accounts now than ever. The reason is that even though a new account might get free delegation, an old account might not and if one has been interacting here and extracting all, they might find their account marooned on an island without RCs. Buying Steem will of course fix that problem but the price might not be 80 cents at that time. Who knows though, it is part of the risk game.
In a month from today I should be arriving in Poland for the start of SteemFest and what I am very interested in doing is hearing what ideas the developers have on how they are going to utilize the Resource Credit system. I am also hoping that I might be able to corner one or two of them over a drink or a game of pool and suggest a few things they may have overlooked in their calculations.
As said, I ma not great with numbers but bigger picture and behavioral areas I do have some skills in from time to time that a more technical person might not consider as an important factor. Small changes and tweaks can make massive differences to both User Experience and perhaps more importantly for culture development, User Actions. Since the Dapps and communities are going to be major gateways, they need to think about these things before they open the gates.
We all have to remember that our actions here have an effect and going on the speed of my feed, so do our inactions. For me at least, as uncertain as the future of Steem may be, it has never looked brighter. Stop looking at the price for a little while and instead concentrate on the mechanics of the system a little more. Once you build a decent mental model, it is not very difficult to know where your efforts are required.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
Oh since I started writing the reward pool has gone up to this:
That is 767 more STEEM to distribute.