RE: Daily Discussion No. 6: What is UP with SBD? And is This Going to Last?
[...] Is the fact that SBD is traded on external exchanges inherently a problem when it comes to trying to keep the value of SBD at $1.00? There's no control over what external traders can do...
Unless it can be used by traders it doesn't have much use. But because of the pump / dump vulnerability you have identified correctly as being especially fragile considering it's small market cap, it is hard for witnesses to do anything about it in particular when the value increases a lot.
However witnesses are not doing anything about it, at all. It's true that they have limited tools to force downward pressure, but more importantly they are against using them to correct short term spikes. I think this restraint is good, though we should still be asking them questions about it.
In the medium to long term though, if SBD continues to trade well above $1 USD then I think we have a problem. Mainly because it is not fit for purpose, and I'm teasing out the other details in chats and my posts.
Do you think it will ever go back down to $1, like it was intended?
My opinion currently is that if it does not in a matter of months then we need to consider what it's utility is beyond yet another coin for speculation.
There is something we can do if we want to both try to maintain the peg and go long by trusting in Steem, i.e. something that is in our interest: always get your post payouts in 50%/50% SP to SBD, and sell your SBD for Steem in the internal market.
Here's one for you: would you prefer to see your Steem based assets increase in value or you SBD assets?
An interesting question! I note that SBD are produced and distributed via author rewards, unlike SP, which can be gained via curation. This means that SBD are a vector for distributing wealth to content creators, which tend to be not whales. Whales certainly get the majority of author rewards, but they get a far higher percentage of curation rewards, and I believe high SBD prices tend to reward minnows proportionately more than SP based rewards, which are skewed to whales.
Were it not for votebots, I would be fully in favor of this situation. However, I reckon that payment for votes in SBD is dead at these SBD prices - except for non-minnows. Whadda you think about that? Will votebots continue to thrive even though it costs so much more to buy votes in SBD now?
Yep, this was one of the first points that I heard that made me take notice of the issue. However since taking notice it's occurred to me that this also incentivizes self voting and scam bots by the same stroke. @remlaps has observed some data which suggests that people are self voting more since the price hike.
Yes, it seems that paying for anything is made difficult by the price volatility, so if the price continues to be unstable, rather than if it continues to be high, then it will put a dent in vote buying. Again, I presume people are seeing a better return in self voting and cashing out SBD, so maybe paying for SP delegation and then self voting is the cynics way forward, if you can get SP delegation at a reasonable rate.