Law of Supply and Demand Definition and Explanation OR Why the @sbdpotato experiment just won't work
Related Article and Relevant Article
OK, this one goes to those involved on the discussions related to the @sbdpotato project. Just as a way to try to keep the discussion going (It's an interesting one, and i think an important topic to be discussed), i am going to tag here whoever i had interactions related to this subject.
So, please, @acidyo, @smooth, @cardboard, @justineh, @epic-fail, @lordbutterfly, @steevc, @thecriptodrive, let's keep this talk going.
(And BTW, please don't mind if i get exalted on some writings. It's just the way a write when is something i get interested in, and it's nothing personal. If i somehow offended any of you, please accept my apologies)
I think that, altough there is probably good intentions behind all of this, i don't think this was actually thought through.
To me, the whole concept is ignoring well proven economic laws, and it's effects could be even more damaging to the Steem ecosystem than it seems at first.
The first problem i already discussed somewhere is that this project is trying to create an fake demand.
The main idea that i bring from this article i linked is this (about the law of demand):
The amount of a good that buyers purchase at a higher price is less because as the price of a good goes up, so does the opportunity cost of buying that good. As a result, people will naturally avoid buying a product that will force them to forgo the consumption of something else they value more.
The basic reason people aren't buying SBD is that right now, the price is too high.
Yes. Your read it right. It is too high.
The point is, SBD don't have enough value when compared with any other similar assets.
Some examples:
- If you buy STEEM, you get value of your increased influence on the STEEM blockchain
- If you buy EOS, you get value on being able to do more free transactions on the EOS blockchain
- If you buy BTC, you get value because you can use it to buy a lot of different stuff
- If you buy ETH, you can pay to do transaction on the Etheretum network
- If you buy BAT, you can use it to pay for directed ads to those that use Brave browser.
In the end, all this "idea" of @sbdpotato is null, because it is trying to virtually increase the demand of something that doesn't have any demand.
On the other side of the Supply and Demand law, we have this:
But unlike the law of demand, the supply relationship shows an upward slope. This means that the higher the price, the higher the quantity supplied. Producers supply more at a higher price because selling a higher quantity at a higher price increases revenue.
If, eventually, the "experiment" have some actual effect on the price, before it goes back to 1 USD, two factors will take place:
1 - The debt ratio will decrease, therefore, more SBD will be printed as programmed by the blockchain and enter the system again.
2 - A lot of people that is holding SBD will start to sell it, because it will be an opportunity to reduce losses, and in some cases, realize profits.
The result of this is that the supply will increase again, forcing the SBD price to go down again.
This is the economics 101 i wrote about somewhere on the comments.
In the end, artificially decreasing supply on the market won't have any long term effect, because the majority of people in the world won't see a good reason to spend money on SBD, and will be more willing to spend it on other similar asset that have more actual value.
As a closure, here is another quote from the article:
Factors Affecting Demand
The number of available substitutes, consumer preferences, and the shifts in the price of complementary products affect demand. For example, if the price of video game consoles drops, the demand for games for that console may increase as more people buy the console and want games for it.
My opinion here is that @sbdpotato and everyone supporting it is directing energy (and money) to something that won't work.
Unless the end game here is to make just a long term pump and dump scheme. But that is another topic i will talk about in the future.
It's a worthless initiative.
It doesn't solve the issue it claims to solve and it's not even a decent revenue maker for BuildTeam.
It does work as a medium to spend your VP on which earns you 50% (in theory) as curation. 😉
Might as well vote for myself.
Why not right?
After all thostalks years ago about reward pool rape, why don't we start to do it in a way that looks like it is for the good of steem?
Minnowbooster does vote @sbdpotato posts and gets some curation out of it, the main idea however is to fix the SBD peg and the theory is Steem will rise with it, which means less Steem needed to pay for BuildTeam infra costs which are paid in USD, BuildTeam and every other business and individual on Steem will benefit in the longrun. That's the hypothesis anyway.
I'm not so sure I agree with this post, SBD was supposed to be pegged 1:1 to the USD, if it isn't it looks broken and looks bad for Steem, it's in the whitepaper. If we aren't going to fix it we might as well get rid of it. Historically the Steem price follows SBD and the idea is that the Steem price will follow any uptick in the SBD price and improve the ratio even further.
So, your premise is essentially because something isn't working according to the whitepaper that it reflects poorly on our chain.
I don't think that necessarily follows but there are more pressing matters than the broken peg. People engaging in meaningful curation less is one such thing.
After all, the white paper suggests voting should be an evaluation of a network contribution. What stands at odds w meaningful curation?
What activities are you currently engaged in that detract from meaningful curation? Selling votes for one which MB still does engage in... although I am glad y'all have made strides to prevent the votes from being abused.
Even so, the case can be made that vote selling undermines the very effort you are engaged in to increase Steem's demand. I've bought more Steem than I ever had once I was filled w hope from the #newsteem spirit and many repenting from selling votes. Not sure if it lasted considering such services still exist. Web based promotion would be such an easy transition with the right ppl so I don't know why we haven't ceased from reward pool based promotion. I digress but my point stands about being consistent.
I think it's inconsistent to make a general white paper appeal while one is engaging in activity contrary to it (irrespective of what Ned's former assent to the practice). If you want to make an appeal, it ought to be more specific as to why failure in this particular aspect of the WP is detrimental.
Otherwise, it seems rather arbitrary. So, why precisely does the peg being broken reduce demand for our native token. That's the question I hope to understand.
Historically SBD pumps are followed by a rise in the Steem price, that's the goal here. Also Minnowbooster earns maybe 5 SBD per day on vote selling currently and is hardly worth noting, we will be phasing down the minnowbooster vote selling services but we can't shut them down that easily without first migrating the lease market fully over to dlease which we are in the process of doing. Minnowbooster is a monolithic codebase and not easy to just remove one part, dlease is microservices based and much more flexible, we are going that route for all our projects.
Thanks for explaining and glad to hear about phasing out the bid bot service. That's the sort of thing that gives me confidence in our chain. 💪
The peg breaks when the market cap of SBD exceeds 10% of the total market cap of STEEM. It's the fault of the low price of STEEM.
Yes, it's kind of like this.
The basic concept here is that the amount of SBD in circulation must be able to pay 10% of the value of circulating STEEM. If the system detects that this is not possible, the system stops printing sbd until the market self-correct due to changes in supply/demand ratio.
Scrap sbd, its a great idea but it wont make it as a stable coin
Because it was never supposed to be a stable coin.
Think of it as a currency in a country named STEEM.
This country have it's own currency, and as any other currency, it have a value related to other countries currencies.
Of course it was intended to be a stablecoin. STEEM is the native currency of Steem. SBD is a stablecoin the purpose of which is to be stable enough to facilitate merchant adoption.
yes, stable, but not as a USD stable coin.
It's stability is related to STEEM, not USD.
Totally wrong.
SBD is pegged to the US dollar. When you convert one SBD, you get exactly 1 USD worth of STEEM (when the debt ratio is below 10%). That is the way in which its value is backed by STEEM. From the upside, the peg is supposed to work by increasing supply when the price of STEEM increases.
For now, I can't bring new arguments on this part of the discussion, because I still need to research a bit more about it.
All my above arguments are based on what I remember. I will go back to this point probably on the next article.
Have a witness !BEER
_
Thanks! Can I trade it for some !WINE or !WHYSKY ?
This is where you go wrong. When the debt ratio starts decreasing and goes back under 10% while the price of SBD is under 1 USD, it does get printed (in smaller than normal quantities while the debt ratio is over 9%) but it can also be converted into STEEM, which removes it from circulation. The current plight of SBD is only the result of the recent very low price of STEEM. What will send the debt ratio tumbling back to sub-10% levels is a higher price of STEEM.
When the price of STEEM recovers, the price of SBD is forced to remain over 1 USD because of the conversion mechanism.
That said, I'm not convinced @sbdpotato is a good idea. That's because inflating the value of SBD will only increase the debt ratio. A higher price of STEEM alone can make the peg work again.
I am still going to dig a bit deeper on this to try to understand better and come up with a way to make it easier to understand.
But from what I know so far, the debt ratio is a relation between steem total value x sbd total value (circulating), and a change on any of the assets value will have an influence over the debt ratio, so I was talking only about one side of the equation, Wich is related to what @sbdpotato is trying to achieve.
Yes you are right about this part.
But about the conversion of sbd to Steem there is 2 different things:
1 - trading sbd x steem on the market doesn't take sbd out of circulation. It only exchanges the ownership.
2 - there is a conversion function somewhere on the blockchain destroy the sbd, removing it from circulation, but I think that very few people know about it and/or use it.
But that doesn't actually matter, because the supposed effect of price increase due to low supply won't have a real effect, because the market will adjust it self, and a downward pressure will start to build, because there is no real reason to own sbd.
I'm talking about the conversion function, of course. And those in possession of the largest amounts of SBD do know about it.
I disagree on there being a reason to own SBD. While imperfect, SBD has many times lower volatility than STEEM. That is the reason SPS funding is paid out in SBD. STEEM is so unstable you can't base real world projects on pay in STEEM.
I could say that lower volatility is a feature, not a function of SBD. And this the main reason SBD exist, and not only STEEM.
The issue here is that the majority of the community see sbd the wrong way, because there isn't a good and clean explanation about the blockchain economic model.
And this is where there is a lot of missed opportunity being missed to add value to the system as a whole, and project/experiments based on wrong premisses, like @sbdpotato keep appearing.
Damn, I even think that Steemit inc. don't actually understand what sbd function should be in the network. Maybe they didn't fully understood the white paper.
My hope here is that those with bigger influence around here understand what I am trying to say, and we start having a culture shift.
I think it's clear Steemit, Inc intended SBD to serve as a stablecoin to enable merchants to set up shop on Steem more easily. Most of the time it has worked reasonably well.
@sbdpotato is a good project, the only flaw of which is in my opinion the fact that the creators of potato posts should set up more placeholder comments to help distribute the rewards so as to keep the posts out of Trending. There is nothing else wrong with the project.
"There is nothing else wrong with the project."
The whole project is wrong. It won't achieve what is intends to, it's directing funds(rewards) to something that is totally useless and no necessary, and if it eventually succeeds, it will make the SBD market looks like a really elaborated pump n dump scheme.
Steemit doesn't have a exactly good image when seen by outsiders, so this can be damaging Steemit reputation more than helping.
Also, this make direct big STEEM stakes to "mine" curation rewards with very little effort, wich disincentivizes them to look for other ways to have investment returns.
Burning SBD is not useless and unnecessary at least if you think SBD shouldn't exist.
Non sequitur.
The posts in Trending? I agree. That's why they started to post more frequently so as to keep the rewards per post smaller.
An internal stablecoin that works better helps everyone. SBD needs stability for SPS funding to work better.
Let me phrase it another way:
Reducing supply is useless if there is no demand.
Sbd have a reason to exist, and I don't think it should cease to be exist, they the community use it is wrong.
Proper arguments still on the works. For now it's just a feeling based of past knowledge.
It's not only about trending page. It's how the blockchain ecosystem as a whole (and this includes trending, market prices and movements, and projects built using the blockchain)
If a usd stable coin on the blockchain is really needed, why not implement one that actually works as a usd stable coin? SBD isn't designed for it. It have stability properties, but not USD equivalence stability.
Amazing article, great work with this one!
Dear @phgnomo
Based on my understanding - this project would increase selling pressure on STEEM. Correct?
I've been thinking about it and I realized that project.hope is kind of having similar result. After all our entire core team (5 venezuelans) are selling whatever STEEM they receive from our project for their work.
Am I right?
Also correct me if I'm wrong - is steemit inc. selling still 800k steem monthly? comparing to those numbers - it's hard to say that @sbdpotato could actually affect price of steem.
Let me know if I'm wrong.
Yours, Piotr
That depends a bit on how the sell is happening.
In the sbdpotato case, they sell steem on a daily basis as a taker (accepting the highest priced buy order), therefore they are actively pushing STEEM price down everyday.
If project hope does the same they are also an active downward force.
The 800k from steem Inc probably aren't sold immediately, and they putting sell orders, acting more as a liquidity provider (I hope they are doing this. Wasn't able to check it yet.)
But in the end is more about volume in on direction or another. Unless there is a movement to give people reason to buy STEEM more than people are selling, the price will be pushed down.
Also there is always steem entering the system due to inflation, so the sell pressure is a constant.
What is needed is good reasons for people to buy STEEM.