The SBD-USD peg is doing us a huge favour!
A LOT higher!**
If the SBD peg was to be abandoned, and the real price of SBD taken into account for our rewards, we would be getting significantly less SBD. Less SBD means a lot less USD reward value, and a lot less potential to buy up STEEM and POWER IT UP!!
Let me explain:
Post rewards as they are now
Let's keep things simple by setting a few parameters here:
We'll set the post reward after curation split to $30.
The post reward is calculated in STEEM (technically in VESTS which are converted into STEEM tokens), and converted into $ at the price feed maintained by the witnesses. So if your post reward is 5 STEEM, and the STEEM price is 6SBD=1STEEM, your potential reward is $30 (based on the 1SBD=$1 peg). Of course you only get about 75% of that due to the curation split, but let's say your reward after curation is worth 5 STEEM.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
The reward is split in half, so you get 2.5 STEEM, and 2.5 STEEM's worth of SBD which, because of the 1SBD=1USD system peg, translates to 2.5 STEEM x 6 SBD/STEEM = 15 SBD.
Now you can take the SBD to the internal market (or Bittrex or wherever you can trade STEEM and SBD), and buy STEEM at about 0.821946 SBD/STEEM, and load up on another 18.75 (about that) STEEM!! That makes your USD value of your post reward somewhere around $90 at the current price of STEEM ($4.3 at time of writing this).
What happens if we take away the peg and use the market price of SBD?
Now let's say the 1SBD=1USD peg is done away with, and the market rate for STEEM is used instead. The market rate is currently about 0.821946 SBD/STEEM, so for simplicity let's say it is 0.8. That 2.5 SBD you got would change to a paultry 2.5 STEEM x 0.80 SBD/STEEM, or 2 SBD.
Take that back to the market and buy the STEEM back at 0.8 SBD/STEEM, and you're back to your 5 STEEM, which at the price of $4.3 gives you a USD 21.5 post value.
So there you can see that they way things are right now; keeping the 1USD=1SBD peg locked in for calculating rewards, we are being rewarded more than 400% above what we would get if the market rate was being used. This is allowing the smaller accounts, like me, to grow their STEEM POWER at a much higher rate than has ever been the case.
Now please don't do this:
Make sure you do this:
This is where you get the best rewards!!
Images used from pixabay.com. The tables were sucked out of thin air...(no, I did a little maths).
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