RE: Daily Discussion No. 6: What is UP with SBD? And is This Going to Last?
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.