Fixing STEEM : You say Potato I say Potatoe

So STEEM is kind of busted up at the moment. We have a STEEM DOLLAR which is supposed to be pegged at $1 USD and has been trading well under 75 cents for over 2 months. The STEEM price itself almost hit single digits this week and we have some ongoing conflict about how, where and why the free downvotes are being used – all of which seems to be driving more established Steemians away from STEEM than attracting new people. That said, there are a couple of positive things going on that I want to help shed some light on and that’s what this post is about. Fixing STEEM.

Any long term followers of my blog (if there are any of those left) would know that I’ve been banging on about the SBD Peg to $1 USD since late 2017 when it first started breaking in a very serious way. A lot has happened since then and while I became a bit unpopular for my doomy predictions they ALL played out. We are now hopefully near the absolute low for the ecosystem and while I’d still like to see the SBD Peg mechanism itself fixed, there is an initiative via the Hive account@sbdpotato account to try and destroy some of that excess System Debt that was built up by the SBD pump in late 2017 – early 2018. Basically the idea is for the community to upvote Hive account@sbdpotato posts with the proceeds of those posts then used to purchase SBD and convert to STEEM – thus destroying the over-supply of SBD. I imagine that this rinse and repeat process could work a bit like a rolling snowball, with the cyclical conversions gradually getting bigger and bigger every 3.5 days. While there might be some value loss during the conversion process the overall amount in circulation would be periodically augmented by daily post rewards on the Hive account@sbdpotato account. The initiative is not profit driven so it does not rely on arbitrage fluctuations to incentivise conversions, thus it can be a constant debt reduction initiative that will work over time if the community supports it.

Now into its 8th iteration and using the tag #spud / #spud8 this is an attempt to focus and cheerlead STEEM Power Ups on the first day of each month. There are some pretty decent prizes on offer for participants from some of the more benevolent community members. There has been a lot of STEEM powered down and sold in recent times and this initiative is about trying to encourage some of the smaller Steemians to help buck that trend. If you have a reputation between 42 and 69, have existing Steem Power between 150 and 7501 then you can power up on December 1, write about it with the #SPUD8 tag and you will qualify for upvotes and prizes. If you’ve been thinking about taking advantage of the current low STEEM price and building your account a bit (like I have) then taking part in this initiative is a bit of a no-brainer. Do it on December 1 and jump through a couple of easy hoops for a potentially sweet bonus.

There are other worthwhile projects going on, but these are a couple of good ones that I believe will genuinely help the STEEM ecosystem if well supported. Even if it only helps in a small and gradual way it does not matter if you’re only a small player you can still get involved to assist if you want to help STEEM turn the current death spiral around. From a risk / reward perspective I do personally believe that STEEM at 10 cents is a good bet. There is still a decent chance we are going to zero, but there ARE valuable communities and content here and so there is also a decent chance we could be back at $1 in a year or 2 – which would be a x10 investment from this point. The chances of us getting back to $1 STEEM in the medium term are a lot better than 10% so it's very simple math.

DISCLAIMER – This is not financial advice