If anyone has paid attention to the price of Steem over the past 24 hours, you’ve seen it rise 40-50% in relation to Bitcoin. This is awesome for the currency as a whole and for those of us with SteemIt accounts. Thank you South Korea!
For us minnows looking to increase our account's Steem Power by posting quality content, we are forced to use services like Minnowbooster and any other upvote bots to earn Steem and SBDs on our posts. I’ve documented many times that those with Steem Power and influence will continue to upvote posts of their friends and posts that earn them high curation rewards. They will not fully (100%) upvote good content from random minnows. They may throw a 5% vote our way every now and then but this is done usually to only maximize their curation rewards…not to provide the author with deserving income…look at 
In fact, if good content from a minnow happens to be trending or hot and earn a lot of attention and value, it is more likely to be downvoted by the whales who can find any reason to downvote it. Why you ask? Because it cuts into their reward pool payout.
This is the reality of the Steem blockchain and the reality of the world income in general. Those with the most money (Steem Power in SteemIt’s case) will continue to earn the most income. It’s a system that rewards wealth, not work.
In this report from Oxfam International, aptly titled “Reward Work, Not Wealth” they show how the top 1% wealthiest people amassed 82% of the world’s total accumulated wealth in 2017! A majority of the wealth being created in the world is going to the top…and the gap is widening.
This is how Steem operates as well. The top accounts continue to earn the most “interest” on their Steem Power in terms of author rewards, curation rewards, benefactor rewards, etc… Someone should take a deep dive into just how much the top 1% of Steem Whales earn in relation to the total rewards pool over a given period of time. I’ve said this before, but this is why Steem is not really a “decentralized” reward system. It’s mostly centralized.
I understand people don’t want to talk about this or comment on it because they are afraid of repercussions. They are deathly afraid of downvotes that could essentially wipe out their accounts. They are afraid of losing what little they have built. They know that what they post to the blockchain, stays in the blockchain. But listen folks, this is a problem, like in the real world, that’s not going away unless more people talk about it…complain about it…try to solve it. It only helps the long-term survival and mass adoption of the currency/platform if we address it head on. You must speak up if this is a concern to you as well.
I’ve proposed in the past that Steem move to a system that rewards by number of upvotes…not just by who upvotes the content. It wouldn’t be that hard to build a "number of upvotes" factor into the reward calculation moving forward, while maintaining all the current settings. I’m not suggesting to get rid of the current system entirely. We just need to work to incentivize quality content, using number of upvotes as the determining factor, and not just rely on accounts like 
With that all said, I’ve come the real reason for my post today. Any minnow using upvote bots like Minnowbooster are at the mercy of the Steem internal base feed price. The feed price is the median price of Steem as reported by the top 20 Witnesses over the past 3.5-day period and it updates every 30 minutes (that’s 84 data points). As one point is added, one drops off.
When minnows send in their SBDs for an upvote they are essentially placing a short-term (2-7 days) trade with SteemIt on the value of Steem’s feed price.
If the feed price goes down over the remaining duration of their post, they lose money/value on that trade. They will get less SP and SBD back than the value they put in. And it can be a lot less depending on the severity of the drop in the internal feed price. The curators (those who upvoted the post) will get paid out too between 25-30%.
If the internal feed price goes up over the remaining duration of the post you just paid for, you will be paid out more than what you put into the upvote bot. The trade will be in your favor.
So how should you use the median feed price chart to determine when to use upvote bots?
Here’s a recent screenshot of the Steem feed price from steemnow.com developed by 
This is an example of when you want to go all in on upvote bots. As soon as the price shot above the current feed price and stayed there is the time you want to “invest”. This was at about 12:30pm Eastern Time yesterday…1/24. And since then the feed price has climbed as high as $6.61.
Since it’s the median of 84 price points (i.e., the 42nd price point), when the price points that are below the current feed price of $4.34 start dropping out of the data set and are replaced by higher price points…currently in the $6+ range, the feed price will rise. It will continue to rise as all of those lower price points drop off.
Here’s the current feed price as of this posting:
Notice how the added price points on the right side of the graph are all above the current feed price.
The current feed price of $4.34 is like a coiled snake…waiting to strike. And it’s going to jump up BIG! The median feed price of the last 24 hours is around $6. This means that a $1.64 or 38% increase is expected over the next 2.5 days, assuming the price of Steem stays in the $5-7 range, which looks likely since South Koreans have been buying the crap out it lately :)
Since the upvotes you pay for are based on the current feed price…any investment you make now using minnowbooster should pay out handsomely over the next 2-3 days. Beyond that it’s anyone’s guess.
As a minnow, I can’t afford to pay for upvotes to content that I create today. There’s just too much risk with a 7-day payout when the feed price is calculated over 3.5 days. Minnowbooster recently went to a 5-day upvote submission limit. This means you can no longer upvote posts that are 6.5 or even 5.5 days old. But you can upvote posts that are 5 days or less, which is still enough time to make an educated guess about your upvote investments if you monitor the Steem feed price. That's 2 full days of risk on your investment...(i.e., the minimum investment period). Other upvote bots may allow for older posts to be upvoted.
For now, Minnowbooster allows a 5 day old post upvote...but I see that changing shortly to 3.5 days.
I would guess you have about another 1 to 1.5 days to get your upvotes in to your 5-day old posts to take advantage of this jump that’s going to happen. After that, we just won’t know.
Conversely, when the feed price chart is printing or added price points that are below the median or feed price you want to avoid using upvote bots. So after the next 1.5 days...I'm gonna wait and see before paying for more upvotes.
I hope this information is helpful to you. For me personally, I've made or will be making my bets and then I’m gonna be watching the feed price over the next 2 days like this:
Good luck everyone!
Chris