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With 1 Steem you could double up your Steem power for 3 weeks.
It might be a while before I can really tell how good my new strategy is working. I should have my slider bar within a week though. :)

My 100 % upvote is worth about 0.0022xxx cents .. lets round it to . 0.0025 for simplicity. It takes 4 upvotes to get to 1 cent. 40 upvotes for 10 cents. 400 upvotes for $1. So if I were to spend $1 steem on renting the same amount I would have to upvote myself 650 times at 100 % power to break even and make my 1 Steem back within a 3 week period.

It would only take 325 upvotes due to the steem I already have but I can't include that value because I would get it regardless of if I rent some SP or not.

Your 100% vote at 100% power should be about .0047 if you added 50 Steem power I think that would give you 1 cent upvotes so $2.1 total over the 3 week period for a $1 Steem investment.
For the pure 50 Steem investment I think you'd get a positive 5% return but the return is better if you lease over a longer period of time or at a better rate than I got.
https://www.steemnow.com/upvotecalc.html
You also pick up more curation rewards so the math is not even as "simple" as I am giving you. lol
There's also the ability to do 1 cent upvotes at 100% power which might help with your platform visibility.
If you want things to get really complicated we could start going into ROI's and bots and stuff. lol #not
There's also lost votes you aren't factoring in as well. If you aren't serious about the platform and testing don't expect serious upvotes from me especially when I have my slider bar in a week and there is more but I think I'll stop. lol

We can't include the value of the SP we already own as we get that value anyways.

I left out curation rewards on purpose as its an unknown factor. The curation rewards might be the deciding factor on if its worth it to rent SP or not. With my low voting weight I don't get much curation reward currently so I don't expect much of an increase with only being at 100 SP with a 50 SP lease.

With each vote the value of the next diminishes. So catching the eye of a few more followers will hurt your short term gain on recovering that Steem spent on renting SP.

The more upvotes you give out to others .. the more you will need to give yourself to regain your investment.

My first example was bare bones as like you said there are allot of factors to consider.

As I said.. if I do decide to test renting SP then it will likely be enough for me to get that slider. I have been testing lots and using lots of different strategies since I have arrived.

And we have to take into consideration catching the eye of those who frown upon such activities as self-upvoting.

For now I will continue with the current strategy I started last week ( while keeping a close eye on that steem price ) and see how it turns out over the next week or so before deciding to move onto another one.

Four votes to get a penny?....OMG I didn't know that, I thought each upvote was worth a penny....this site is worse than I thought, no wonder so many people are using alternate routes to get their power up.

Allot of votes are worth less then mine. I have 43 SP and most accounts start with about 15 SP. Which would mean currently an average new members vote is worth less then 1 / 10th a penny.

You have to think outside the box to grow on here as catching the eye of a whale is a rare thing to do.

You must get delegations now!!! I have the slider bar!!! :) lol

Awesome did you rent more ?

I have some USD sitting at BTC-Alpha that I am going buy some ETH and then trade for STEEM. I got the money from receiving crypto for blogs I wrote so its free cash. I also have some bitcoin but I don't like losing value so I will likely hold until the bitcoin price gets back to $10,000 before trading that away.

It looks like Binance gives the best value for Steem so I will have to work on getting my log in issues fixed tomorrow.

My plan : Buy *200 Steem wait until Steem and SBD come closer in price and swap the steem for SBD. Use the SBD to power up via bots. This will allow me to gain more SP for my Steem and have liquid SBD / Steem in my account to play around with.

I plan on leasing when I am close to that 500 SP mark to push me to it.

Yep. Over half of my Steem power is now delegated to me.
I think delegation is the way to go.