Most of you probably already have heard of @minnowbooster one way or another.

Maybe you know the upvote-bot or have used it yourself. Maybe you know the Steempower Leasing & Delegating Option. For me - I’ve used the up-vote bot and was so happy with it that I looked into Steempower Leasing.I've done a bit of theorycrafting and created a spreadsheet to calculate if it would be profitable to invest into Steempower Leasing (not delegating - I won’t go into it in this post).
I want to share those revelations with you, while also asking for your help if I did any thought-mistakes.

Alright, first of all a quick introduction into Steem Power Leasing.

What Is Steempower?

Steempower is what decides how much your up-vote is worth.

If you have 100 Steempower then your 100% upvote is worth 0.02$.
If you have 1000 Steempower then your 100% upvote is worth 0.17$.
If you have 10000 Steempower then your 100$ upvote is worth 1.7$

It is however important to mention that the amount of $ is calculated through 1.) the reward pool and 2.) the steem price. Both are changing all the time. Steem price for example went from 1.3 to 1.6 today alone. So those votes are worth more automatically. If the steem price drops - upvotes are worth less.

Additionally - the more people vote on steem - the less your vote is worth and visa versa.

The worth of your up vote determines how big of an influence you have. How much you can shape the attention of a post. Giving a post an upvote of 5$ will easily catapult the post from new category to hot and thus increases the exposure for other Steemians.

It also - and this is what I’ve calculated - increase the amount of curation you get.

For example - if I upvote my own post right after creating I give myself the value of my upvote directly. So if my up vote is worth 1$ - I just gave myself 1$. This also can be used to boost your own post to the hot or trending category yourself.

What Is VotingPower (VP) /VoteStrength? (VS)

The difference between VP and VS is that:

VP tells you how much VP from 0% to 100% you still have. About 20% of VP gets regenerated over 24h. (0.98 ^ 11 ~= 0.80)
VS tells you how strong your Vote is. Think of it as if you are playing a fighting game. And the character you play has light, normal and special attacks. The light attack will take less time and power to cast. The Normal Attack will take more and the special attack will take a lot more but does probably a lot more damage. VS is similar to that.

VS can be changed with a bar around the voting area once you reach a certain amount of SP - I think it is about 500. So don't worry if you don't see it.

When you upvote with 100% VP and 50% VS and 20$ - your upvote is worth 10$.
When you upvote with 50% VP (because you already upvoted a lot) and 100% VS and still 20$ - your upvote is also only 10$.
When you upvote with 100% VP and 100%VS and 20$ - your upvote is then worth 20$.

Voting on your own posts or others

So you should upvote about 11 times every day. The question now is: on what.

You could upvote your own posts and comments - which will bring you a very steady and 100% income of your Vote Worth - but that's not very cool. Or you you can upvote on other content. Either because you like it or because you think that it is a hidden gem and will generate some traffic.

If you vote on your own posts - it doesn't really matter when you vote but earlier is better. However, when you vote on other peoples content - there is a timeline of 30 minutes where in those 30 minutes the reward you get will get more curation reward the nearer it gets to the end. And the nearer it is to the creating of the post - the more of that upvote reward the author himself will get.

When you find good content and you really like it - you could wait for it to reach the 30 minute mark and then upvote it or you could upvote it without thinking about it.

The thing is - the earlier you post on something without many upvotes on it - the more reward you will get. But the earlier from a timeline you upvote it - the less you get. So it is a mindgame to decide when to vote.

What is Leasing?

Leasing means that you rent something for a period of time. For this time you pay a specific amount. You probably heard of it when talking about buying a car - or rather leasing it since it most people rather do the second. The same principle applies to Steempower Leasing - you pay someone a specific amount of Steem (e.g. 4 Steem) for 1 Week of 400 Steempower. At the end of the 1 week you will lose the Steempower but won't get the 4 Steem back also.

Leasing Profit Calculation

Now let me get to my calculation:
(I will use shortcuts - Voting Power (VP), SteemPower (SP), VoteDollar (VD))

First case will be the perfect, not-cheating case where I only up vote myself about 2 times at 100% VP as I create my own posts and 8 times other posts. Perfect as it is very difficult to only vote with 100% on posts you actually like rather than just something that pops up.

My base value to calculate the steem vote-price is about 0.00016645$

Let’s calculate how much I earn with my own steempower. I have currently around 100 VP.

My VD equals 0.017$ = 100 VP * 0.00016645$.

I can vote 2 times every day for myself and 8 times for others. Let’s just say that when I vote for others I get around 70% of the return as if I vote only for myself (if I’m wrong about that - please correct me)

Every Day: 0.134$ = 2 Votes * 0.017$ + (8 Votes *0.017$ * 0.7 PercentValue)
Every Week: 0.938$ = 0.017$ * 7 Days
Every Month: 3.752$ = 0.938$ * 4 Month

So I’ll earn around 4$ every month through upvoting with 100 SteemPower if everything works out.

Now let’s say I want to lease some SP. For this I need to pay 1 STEEM for 75 SP (1 -3 weeks) or 1 STEEM for 150 SP (4-12 weeks).

4+ Weeks is obviously way cheaper and thus I will use this in my calculation. Let’s say I want to get 1500 SP for 4 weeks.
That means: 10 STEEM * 4 = 40 STEEM for 4 weeks.

Currently the price for 1 STEEM is around 1,60$ which means 40 STEEM have a value of 64$. So I need to make at least 64$ to make it even. For this, I will use the same calculation as above.

My VD equals 0.25$ = 1500 VP * 0.00016645.

Every Day: 1.9$ = 2 Votes * 0.017$ + (8 Votes * 0,017$ * 0,7 PercentValue)
Every Week: 13.3$ = 1.9$ * 7 Days
Every Month: 53.2$ = 13.3$ * 4 Month

Through my calculation - I would only make around 77% of my invest as a return. If we would do this calculation with 100% self-voting you would make around 70$ - so 110% of the investment.

Conclusion

Now, free money is free money but in comparison to other crypto investment alternatives - I’m not sure if it is the best way to increase your rewards to lease SteemPower. As you saw in the first example - the return is even lower as the investment.

So as a pure ROI SP Leasing might not be the best thing - however on the positive side: Leasing SP will give you a lot of influence and with this you can change Steemit for the better. Even an upvote with "only" 10 cents sometimes makes a difference for the author and gives him the motivation to continue.

I want to thank the @minnowbooster team - @thecryptodrive, @reggaemuffin, @whaleshares for their amazing work. Maybe you could say one or two words to my theory.

If you think that I did a mistake or rather you have something else which I haven't thought about - please comment under this post because I would actually love to see leasing SP to be profitable.

That’s it for now. Hope you have a great day! :)
-Wolf