MinnowBooster is a great investment: 16.5% annually! That's after a month of daily data points.

Delegate

I had been delegating 10k SP to MinnowBooster, and as a result of this recent DDoS attack decided to take some time off, checking back every day to see if the site was behaving better. (I know there are other interfaces, but I needed a break anyway.) After a couple days of not writing posts or comments, or curating, I realized that I was at 100% voting power and it was being “wasted”.

Not entirely wasted, as I’ve recently configured my http://SteemVoter.com rules to reward three people who my followers helped determine.

So, I decided to delegate even more to MinnowBooster, tripling my investment to a little over 30k right now, leaving me with around 600 SP – the goal being to keep the “upvote slider” (given at 500 SP or more) even though my upvote has fallen dramatically as I mentioned yesterday.

This also has the effect that the SteemVoter rules aren’t as rewarding to those receiving those upvotes, since they’re now only worth seven cents as well (at 100% voting power that is – which they will tend to be for now, since those three are only making around 10 posts a day total).

Tabulate

My “Wallet” shows returns from MinnowBooster, so let’s tabulate it all and come up with what we should expect, moving forward.

The first four payouts were around 7 SBD each; then it dipped when MinnowBooster got a large investment, to 1.7, 2.7, 4.7, then 5.5. Then it stayed between 4 and 5 for 6 days, jumping up to 6.4 the following. Then came down again, 5.4, 4.9, 2.8; then rose, 3.9, 4.4, 4.7, 5.5, 6.1, 6.5, then 6.8; and the last few days were between 5 and 7. These total 156.796 SBD, and that’s for 30 days worth of returns with 10k SP delegated.

So with those raw numbers, let’s extrapolate out to a year: 156.796 * 12 = 1,881.552 SBD. Now, we can’t exactly compare SP and SBD; when I made the 10k SP investment, 1 SP cost $1.14 (it’s $1.08 right now), so those 10k SP were worth $11,400, or about 11,400 SBD since they try to keep the price of SBD in parity with one dollar.

That previous post showed a 22% annual (non-compounded) return, but that was only after the first four days which were the best returns out of that 30-day period. So, doing the math on this additional data shows that it’s around a 16.5% return. Although that’s “only” 2/3 the return it had been showing previously, it’s still an excellent return on one’s investment compared to most other vehicles.

Now, let’s check the single data point I have from the increase to 30k SP delegated, from last night, which was 19.094 SBD. Extrapolate that to a year and it’d be 6,969.31 SBD, and use the same SP price for the comparison of $1.14, so those 30k SP would be worth $34,200 (or 34,200 SBD). This then would be a 20.4% annual return. But, that’s only from a single data point, and it might be that this data point is on the high side like the first four were.

I think the 16.5% annual return figure is probably closer to reality. Which is still really, really good!

BitConnect: Don't Do It!

My investment in BitConnect has one more month before I can withdraw the principal. It has already returned “more than” the amount invested – but that’s in dollars, it’s still less than the BTC that I had put in because of the way they run it. Not certain it’s a scam but I won’t put any more into it and I’d encourage others to read my analysis of their setup before investing your own money.

Poloniex Has Bad Customer Service

Another investment that I had, which I’m no longer doing because of their customer service (never addressed my ticket), is Poloniex lending. There’s an open-source bot written in Python, the “Poloniex Lending Bot”, which you can configure for your account. While I was doing this, up to a few months ago, it was returning around 50% annually when I first set it up around the beginning of June. By the end of June that was around 35%. Mid-July, it was down again, to 18%. Then a few days later with the BTC/BCH fork happening, people wanted to keep their BTC so they could get the split coins, and the lending rate went through the roof because the supply dried up – but, that was a temporary matter, sending the rate up to 202% briefly! But then, after the split, it came crashing back down.

Poloniex made a few stupid moves then as well, like saying “we’re going to keep everyone’s BCH” and then backed away from that plan. Also the site was down for a few days, which was just after BTC-e went down, and gave me a funny feeling -- just as did their ignoring my tickets for weeks (tickets were never answered, not even a "we're busy, will get to you soon"). So, I pulled the plug on that investment, which was around two months ago.

How Do They Compare?

So: the MinnowBooster delegation investment appears to have a return similar to the Poloniex Lending Bot. And, it has far less risk: I can choose to un-delegate at any time, and it’ll only take a week for the funds to return to my Wallet. Whereas at Poloniex, you set the maximum duration for a loan, but then the other party decides how long to keep it (within that limit). Just before the BTC/BCH fork, I had it configured for two-day loans normally, or 60-day (the max) if it was above 0.3% daily, which I wasn’t really expecting.

Then, the fork caused people to hoard their BTC so they could have the split coins, which caused the rate to go well above the 0.3% daily, meaning I then had to wait almost two months before the last of my coins were returned to me, which has just been completed last week.

It doesn’t really even compare at all to BitConnect, because I can’t recommend them. Their “trading bot” is so opaque it might as well be that old “then a miracle occurs” on the chalkboard:

It is not as easy to compare MinnowBooster to curation rewards, since those tend to be random based on whoever else is upvoting, and by how much. However, the past week I’ve made 17.5 SP curating, and 21.3 SP + 1 SBD authoring. Also note that those were using around 20k SP (since I had had the 10k SP already delegated). And although I’ve been mostly absent since the DDoS started, that was less than a week ago and there’s a 7-day delay on rewards, so it’s still returning based on days I was active (if that makes sense).

The numbers for that are much less impressive; even including the authoring rewards, it’s 2,017.6 SP returned from a 20k SP investment, or about 10% annual return. And leaving the authoring rewards to the side, to just compare curating, it’s under 5%.

I am always open to new investing ideas! This one seems like a home run. Please share any that you’ve found that seem to be working, and thanks! :)

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