I Bought My Way to 1000 SP
Personally, I think that the best way to play SteemIt is to buy enough SP so that the value of one's 100% upvote is worth more than the minimum payout.. The minimum payout is $0.02.
Accounts that reach this wonderful level are able to upvote posts based on the merit of the post and not the curation history of the writer.
People with sufficient SP can even receive rewards for upvoting comments!
Something amusing happened to me.
On just before the HIVE hardfork, I borrowed money to buy tokens. If my payment processed 6 hours earlier, I would have had $500 in both STEEM and HIVE.
Arrrggghhhhh!
I had a decision to make. I put the money in HIVE.
This meant that I had funds in one account that was well funded and another account that lacked adequate funding.
Life with a well funded account is much nice than one where the upvotes are scrubbed as dust.
Because my upvote is worth more than $0.02 on HIVE, I've been able to upvote based on the merits of the post. I can upvote comments.
On Steemit I have to play a tedious game of researching the curation history of each author and only upvoting authors supported by rich patrons.
I find SteemIt so frustrating. There are numerous authors with decent content, but I don't upvote their content as the rewards with disappear as dust.
The Tokenomics of SP
If you had $500 in SP and your upvote was worth $0.02; then you should receive $0.01 in curation rewards for each upvote. That would be 7 cents a day. Multiplying by 365 comes to about $25 a year.
Your account would give out around $25 in author rewards and you would receive $25 in curation rewards. Assuming that the price of STEEM stayed steady, you would double your money in 20 years.
The tokenomics I mentioned in based on the assumption that the price of STEEM would hold steady. The only way for this to happen is for an never ending group of blogging enthusiast entering the platform and buying STEEM.
The price goes up and down.
There was a brief moment when my SteemIt upvote was sufficient to scrub dust ... then STEEM fell.
Rich authors are wise to simply top off whenever the price of STEEM drops and to sluff off the excess when the price rises.
Will the price of STEEM hang steady for the next 20 years?
I really don't know.
It might go up. Who knows?
The equation gets worse when one realizes that the size of the reward pool slowly decreases. So, it make take more than 20 years to pay back the loan!
Although, I think the best way to play STEEM is to buy enough STEEM to have a $0.02. I would not borrow money to buy STEEM.
Actually, I did borrow money ... which I put into HIVE.
I am still paying back the loan.
The True Value of Steem Power
NOTE: The real benefit of having STEEM POWER is that Steemians are happy to interact with users with STEEM POWER. That interaction is the real prize. The sad truth is that the game of buying SP is not a guaranteed win. Sadly, a blockchain is simply an open ledger and ledgers must balance. The game simply shuffles money around. There will be both winners (those who withdraw more than they put in) and losers (those who put in more than they withdraw.)
It is funny. Because I put the money I borrowed into HIVE, I am currently a winner on SteemIt and a loser on HIVE.
I Bought My Way Over 1000 STEEM
Last week I noticed that my account was within striking distance of 1000 SP.
So, I decided to strike.
I sold a week's worth of my HIVE earnings and swapped it for STEEM. This brought my account 1012 SP. My 100% upvote value is worth 0.012 SP which is currently $0.004 USD.
Living Off Curation Rewards
My goal is to live off of my curation rewards. I stake 100% of my author rewards. I power down my curation rewards. SteemWorld shows my curation rewards run between 1 and 2 STEEM a week. I will power down 1 STEEM a week.
I played the same game on BLURT. I bought 16K BLURT. I am earning about 10 BLURT a week.
This table shows my current current holding and curation rewards by week:
| Platform | Tokens | Weekly Earnings | USD Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| HIVE | 6300 | 10 | $2.58 |
| STEEM | 1012 | 1 | $0.14 |
| Blurt | 16,445 | 10 | $0.02 |
| Total | $2.74 |
Let's see, I borrowed $280.00. I should be able to pay off the loan in just 100 weeks ... assuming the price of the tokens hold!
I also have a big pile of coins in Hive Engine. I had a big pile of coins in Steem-Engine. The value of my SE coins went poof when Steem-Engine flamed out.
I am not very good at the game.
Anyway, I am super stoked that I know have 1K SP. My upvote value is now $0.004. It needs to be $0.02 to make a difference.
Anyway, I am now pulling a little bit of income from my cybercurrency empire. The account should be growing by any upvotes I receive.
I generated the image on Night Cafe. It shows a wise owl sitting on a stack of books shortly before the library burned down. The librarian made the mistake of lighting shelves full of inflammable books with candles thinking that "inflammable" meant they couldn't catch fire.
If you enjoy writing, reading and participation/engagement online, these crypto-social platforms offer as good a "savings account" as any out there.
Do you have to put in some effort? Sure you do.
It has actually saved my proverbial bacon, a number of times, from funding a much needed set of new tires for the truck, to paying off a property tax bill that was threatening a tax foreclosure.
So yes, it's a good investment — in more ways than one — if you have the money!
0.00 SBD,
0.34 STEEM,
0.34 SP
Interestingly, the steemit style account destroyed my ability to write and communicate online. I've pushed out thousands upon thousands of posts on free blogs.
The second I started thinking about the monetary value of posts, I lost my ability to write.
Of course, I was thinking about developing programs based on the blockchain model. All of my calculations show that, unless the blockchain is creating something of value, then more money most go into the chain than comes out of it; so I've become like a record player caught in a skip loop while I try to figure out how to make curation work.
0.00 SBD,
0.00 STEEM,
0.63 SP
It was Facebook that ruined my ability to write... I ended up with a sense of "why bother?" in the face of random character attacks being more commonplace than intelligent discourse.
That said, my best blogging days were really back in the late 1990s to about 2005 before Facebook and MySpace decided that inane smileys were a more appropriate form of engagement than actual dialogue.
I never did facebook. I was not into writing posts for my family. In contrast, I really enjoyed creating web sites with PHP and interfacing with the local community.
I think it would be possible to create a truly community focused site on a blockchain. The question is whether or not the reward structure enhances the site or if the rewards simply bring out bad behavior.
Hello @yintercept, thank you for your contribution to our account.