HOW BEANZ BECAME AN ORCA WHALE . . .

When snooping the Trending page like I do on most days to see who's managed to squeeze themselves in between the daily trenders and trending frequenters, I noticed a post by @steemvoter. It was about joining forces with another project called "minnowbooster" and just that name for a project peaked my interest as I do believe the success of this platform depends on the satisfaction not just of the monetary investors, but of those investing their attention - which of course could be better spent elsewhere if steemit doesn't satisfy them.

I checked out the MinnowBooster website where I found myself at a delegation market!

What's a delegation market, you say ?

I say, well when I first landed my initial thoughts were that it were similar to a market where you buy or sell STEEM, only instead of buying it you were leasing or renting it as STEEM POWER and I thought GENIUS!

We had been looking for delegators for an upcoming project (which turned out to be more costly than we anticipated) and I thought excellent, this could be an alternative way to invest in ourselves! So after getting lost on the site a few times missing the right button due to the confusing "Lease from Bot" on the menu bar, I finally found it and decided to test out an amount.

50'000 SP for 4 weeks at 2000 STEEM was offered ....... That was more than I had in my wallet so before going and spending a couple thousand dollars on STEEM I decided to do some calculating.

Using the calculator above I worked out that 50k SP at 100% VP would give out $10.77 per upvote.

At the current price of $1.54, that works out at around 7 STEEM.

So after some brain freezes while trying to do math I worked out that one would require just over 7000 SP to currently give out 1 STEEM, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that is regardless of fluctuations in price though it may be affected by the number of people voting at the time.

Assuming I am correct, with 10 votes per day at 100% voting power makes 280 STEEM to pay out over the course of 28 days.

Lets add to that some potential curation rewards at 7000 SP

With the use of steemdb, rather than count 28 days of curation rewards, which gave unrealistic and unsustainable payouts due to the hardfork, I counted the last 7 and multiplied by 4. You can see on the page below from steemwhales that @skapaneas and @giantbear have made the most for curation overall so I decided to choose them as examples of well paid curators and use @tnkspe119 and @donaldtrump as examples of less skilled curators.

@	VESTS	SP
tnkspe119	13400.626192	27.689247
skapaneas	109849.113132	226.977391
giantbear	121869.579168	251.814861
donaldtrump	36895.042656	76.23494

So what's the total potential for profit?

Keep in mind that you can't have your cake and eat it. If you're rewarding yourself at 1000% per day to make 280 STEEM after 4 weeks, then your potential profit through curation depends only on the popularity of your own posts because you can't vote for other people and keep your voting power up. Curation rewards vary depending on the curator and how good they are at getting in at the right time on a 'will be' popular post (if there is a right time).

Anyway, back to my story!

After all of this calculation I realised that this market is very profitable for delegators, but the profit for the borrower is dependent on a lot of factors.

• curating skills
• marketing skills
• whether you have a brand to market
• how ready your brand is for marketing
• the other curators

For this reason, and a little disheartened, I chose to fill a delegation order instead of make one. Not long after I did, the delegation market was empty! Those orders are swiped up quickly and it is no wonder why.

A job working as minnow support!

So then I started asking questions in the MinnowBooster Support channel to find out if this controlled market was intentional or if there will be an upgrade. I didn't get any answers for quite a while but eventually @reggaemuffin let me know that they had disabled the feature that allowed people to enter their own price that they would be willing to borrow at. I left some comments on the article steemvoter had written and voiced by disappointment in it being a closed market with high prices for minnows.

@truthforce is just one example of somebody who learned the hard way that when paying for delegated SP he was not making his money back even by voting selfishly, as there is a community effort to prevent people from upvoting themselves at a thousand percent per day.

The current controlled market price in my opinion will encourage selfish upvotes by those who gradually realise they are not making back their investment.

This habit of "trash talking" got me an overnight job of working for support on the minnowbooster discord. The open market feature was enabled and I was there to assist people trying to work out an appropriate price. I hadn't yet used the feature myself so I decided to go with what I could easily afford and put a ridiculously low order down for 50'000 delegated SP. I had no expectation of it being filled and jokingly harrassed my brother @demotruk to fill it. But of course I am his sister so I am not to be trusted with such power . . .

A @smooth move

To my surprise my order was filled and though I've been told that he filled it "only as a joke" I refuse not to take it very seriously. Thank you smooth for accepting my order. I received the "early adopters discount" at 10% of the usual price. I intend on voting wisely and responsibly and I will try to avoid selfish upvotes.

SEND ME YOUR SPAM

So now that we know that I have the power, I invite you to link I post below for upvote and as I am asking for it I won't consider it spam. I can't promise that you will get the full power of my vote, but I will take a look and a limited number of posts will get an upvote - I will be trying to keep my voting power above 95% at least until it's time to get some shuteye.

UPVOTE NOT GUARANTEED