Hello fellow minnows!

Today we received a question that we thought to address in a separate post:

I think you should make a new post with revised profit calculations since the price of STEEM is currently $1.45.

So the short answer is that the calculations used in our introductory post don't actually depend on the STEEM price but on the total amount of the reward pool and upvotes made in the steemit ecosystem. So no matter how much STEEM is trading for, through our system You will still receive up to 30% more STEEM than You would by directly powering up.

But we'll try to explain it in more detail. The initial post stated:

For simpler calculations, lets say You use delegations for 20 STEEM and get 750 SP for 28 days. One person can have a maximum of 10 upvotes at full voting power a day. At 750 SP, one upvote is worth $0.10 and thus 10 upvotes would be worth $1.00 ($1.02 actually due to rounding). This means that in 28 days your maximum potential payout is $28 or 25.5 STEEM (Price of STEEM is $1.10 at the time of writing this post). That is an whopping 30% more than the 20 STEEM you put in. Lets recap:

• 20 STEEM --> 750 SP --> $0.1 * 10 votes * 28 days = $28 --> 25.5 STEEM

So if we take todays values then 20 STEEM would get You 750 SP. One 100% upvote today is worth $0.13 and 10 upvotes would be worth $1.30 per day. Doing this for 28 days straight, Your total worth would be $36.40. The price of STEEM today is $1.45 and thus in 28 days You would earn 25.1 STEEM. So to recap:

• 20 STEEM --> 750 SP --> $0.13 * 10 votes * 28 days = $36.40 --> 25.1 STEEM

It's almost the same amount of STEEM we calculated last time when the price of STEEM was over 25% lower!

How is upvote worth calculated?

There are two important numbers in the steemit ecosystem that affect the amount an upvote is worth: these are "reward pool" and "recent claims". A reward pool is the total amount of STEEM that will be distributed to posts (right now its 691,706 STEEM) and it is replenished daily. Recent claims is the total number of upvotes (in rshares) that are waiting for payout (247,423,797B right now).

A posts worth is calculated based on the total amount of the reward pool multiplied by the ratio of the specific posts upvotes to the total upvotes made in steemit. The amount is then translated into SBD using the current value of STEEM. To calculate:

• Post worth = reward pool * upvote rshares / recent claims = number of STEEM * price of STEEM

This means that all the posts actually receive STEEM (converted to STEEM power) as their reward that is then shown as dollars for the ease of recognition. If the "reward pool" and "recent claims" would remain constant, every upvote with the same amount of SP would be worth exactly the same amount of STEEM. This means that delegated SP should earn you more-or-less the same amount of STEEM no matter the price of STEEM.

Unfortunately the "reward pool" and "recent claims" values are not constant and change all the time. You can see it live from the Steemnow upvote calculator. This change is something that describes the steemit ecosystem as a whole and is unpredictable. Therefore, the profit calculations differ a little bit by the hour. But the important part is that it is strictly tied to the total number of upvotes made within steemit and not to the price of STEEM!

We hope that this has shed some light on how an upvote worth is calculated. As You can see, the price of STEEM does not pay a role when You receive Your rewards. It only comes into play when the reward is given a value in $$$.