What I'm Doing as A Witness to Fix the STEEM & SBD Value (what YOU should do too.. maybe)
We're facing a small crisis in regards to the current situation with STEEM and SBD value, Steemit user retention as well as resistance towards ideal conditions for investors to enter. While plenty of talk has been seen in various posts here on steemit and in the chat channels a lack of actual action continues to see the price of both STEEM & SBD fall. It's time as a community to change this immediately.
I'm writing this post as a proposal to my fellow STEEM network inhabitants, witnesses and developers to follow my lead if they agree that STEEM & SBD have future value.
What Can Be Done About This?!
We're still very much on the "maiden voyage" of the STEEM platform, with the high post payout honeymoon phase now over and fading in peoples minds we've got to shift our focus into the longterm game plan: start offering more lucrative incentives for both current and future readers, curators, content creators and investors.
Setting the Steem Dollar Interest Rate Higher
Scaling the Account Creation Fee up too!
What that picture above is my latest witness update today. I've set the Steem Dollar yearly gain to 20% APR as well as scaled the account creation fee to 51.337 STEEM worth around $6.85 USD at the time of writing this post. Not only will this encourage people to convert their STEEM payouts to SBD and hold for more profits but also help enforce the peg as well as create demand and stronger hands.
This change across the network would see people gaining 1.66666667% on SBD balances monthly and have the account creation fee Just under $7.00 USD of STEEM.
Converting STEEM Payouts to SBD in the Internal Market
Help Fight STEEM Inflation Instead of Dumping
The Problem: People are taking their STEEM and dumping it on the market rather than holding on for a large reward later. This causes the STEEM price to plummet.
Solution: Instead of taking your STEEM and Converting it to BTC consider instead swapping it for SBD on the internal market to collect interest paid out monthly.
Powering Up STEEM Rather Than Selling Helps Everyone
By Powering up Your STEEM Payouts Vote Power Grows
The Problem: Content creators are preferring to liquidate their payouts for BTC instead of powering up or converting to SBD and holding. This strains prices.
Solution: Instead of taking your STEEM and selling on the market it consider powering up your or converting to SBD and holding for the interest paid monthly.
A Call to All Users, Witnesses and Developers
Converting STEEM to SBD in the internal market greatly helps balance out the hyper inflation we see with STEEM. Do your part where you can. Every little bit helps.
Fellow Witnesses: Please consider adjusting your APR rate to 20% or more and upping creation fees! We're the ones who need to lead by example. Help me Help STEEM.
Vote @klye for Witness!
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
A Proud STEEMbassador of Canada
(News on @steemcanada Campaign Soon!)
Since we don't have as many options we have been doing the following.
Is there anything else our small team should be doing?
Sounds like you're doing your part! You're an asset to the network sir.
We do have some extra computers from our old servers should we consider mining STEEM or something?
You could! With the patch to the mining code recently it appears that more users have been successful in mining blocks. However I'm not entirely sure at this point a miner would run in profit.. Perhaps if you have cheap / free electricity.
No not cheap unless we move to China :-) Is there any added value if we become a witness or are there plenty already?
This is all incredibly confusing to me, as a noob (I am reading and learning). But assuming I just believe you know what you are saying, since I have no steem or anything else, how do I help? I really don't care about bitcoins or Steem Dollars, I just want to help (I came here because of the distributed nature of it and the emphasis on authorship and avoiding censorship).
As an author, just keep writing. Not everyone can contribute in every possible way, but that does not mean your contributions are unwelcome. If one of your posts becomes popular then you will earn some rewards and then you can consider trading them for SBD or powering them up. Until then, welcome to steem. As you say, it can be confusing, but just take things in at your own pace.
Sounds like you are here for the right reasons!
You can help by simply logging in every day, making a post or 2 and voting on others stuff.
More active engagement we see on site the more likely you are to see folks stay. :)
Here's what I have done and am doing:
The platform needs more than just inflation and user growth. The systems that we compare to like Facebook, do now, after having lived on expectations for a while, have an economy based on commercials and big data collection. The latter is of course a no go zone, but advertising is not. They already discuss how to make a foundation to get fiat money into the steem system. When that happens Steem will again be interesting to investors an it will rise... If not we have wasted some time, but that happens every second. It's called life. Of course this aspect is scary for wage earners, but I have worked for free so many times in my life, and nothing really happens, except you continue to be a vagrant. This is just a crisis and if we get over it (and I think we will) there will be bonuses to all who stood it out.
For now I actually do follow your advice. I have only received Steem Power for my posts since the possibility for doing so was there. No need to speculate against Steemit when it is going downwards.
I like the 20% idea.
Another thing I think would be to maybe somewhere show in your wallet how much interest one is earning by day.
We do that with Steem Power, why not do it with SBD?
That would be a welcome GUI implementation!
It's part of the creative process.. You have to kill the bad brain cells so the good ones can think better!
lol
I've been wondering, why has payout gone to full Steem and Steem power? Does that not just exacerbate the problem by diluting the supply of Steem on the market and forcing those who are selling to dump more and more and more? Wouldn't it make more sense to go the opposite direction and give more post rewards as SBD, thus removing more Steem from the diluted market, and slow down the selling rate? Am I crazy here or are we going in the complete opposite direction of where we should if we want the inflation to slow down?
It is because the "capacity" of the system to handle SBD has reached an exceeded its maximum. As some of the other comments noted, there are multiple challenges occurring at the same time and this is one of them.
It's done.
Thank you for following the lead of smooth and myself bitcoiner. I think this is a step in the right direction!
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I am not sure if this will fix the problem but it may help... I think we have to slash witness pay, cut the inflation rate, AND do some of these other investment incentivizing actions you are talking about.
One thing is for certain, this literally is a crisis moment for Steemit the site and Steem the currency... I just hope the founders and developers see that and can act before it is too late...
You've been misled about the need to slash witness pay. Witness rewards account for approximately 3% of the daily inflation (literally 1 STEEM out of 30 or so STEEM produced per block). That is not at all where the massive STEEM inflation comes from and isn't "draining value" to any significant extent if at all. It is also naturally decreasing over time.
There are a few haters and trolls (or well-meaning but misguided people) who describe witnesses as greedy parasites. Instead of blindly following their rhetoric I suggest you come on the #witness channel on steemit chat and actually talk to some of the witnesses about what they are doing (and spending) to help support and build Steem. If you think that the platform and ecosystem are completely perfect and finished, then this isn't work that is needed. I do happen to think it is needed, and it is the witness rewards that make a lot of it possible.
@klye sorry to post here
@smooth am sorry to try to reach out on you here but I can't reach you on steemit chat .
For some reasons, I can't log in there either - keeps saying server won't load but please get back at me. Thank you
EDIT : @smooth thank you for getting back at me !
steemit.chat has been down for maintenance. When it is back up I will reach you there.
No worries man! This whole network exists for communications. :P
Thanks for the clarification. I haven't looked at the numbers to see for myself, just trusted what I had read... (my first mistake). I do know that there are many well meaning witnesses and that the pay they receive doesn't even cover the projects they are currently funding (like yourself) but others it seems like it could be an overpay. My opinion would be for money from other sources be used to pay for those projects, sources such as some kind of crowdfunding. Your witness pay should not have to be used to pay for projects... The fact that the harder you work the less you make is exactly the wrong kind of system we want setup here.
IMO it isn't a question of overpay, but underperform. Two sides of the same coin, but the fix is a little different, Vote 'em out. We can find 19 who all perform at a high level. There are many good candidates in the top 50, even some in the top 30 who would be relatively easy to move in and replace someone who might not be delivering.
As for 'pay' vs. 'budget', I view it as a more of a business than a job. Witnesses who, as a service business, deliver the most value should be voted in, and if they can do all that and still make a profit, great, but it doesn't need to be guaranteed. Anyone who doesn't find it an attractive proposition can step aside easily.
None of this precludes other funding options such as crowdfunding though. Currently witness pay doesn't even add up to a lot when it comes to the sort of funding you need for big projects -- about $150/day in locked funds (at times it has, perhaps in the future it might again). A witness who organizes a successful crowdfund or leverages other revenue sources besides witness rewards and gets amazing solutions built is doing a good job too IMO.
Good points.
I'm not sure slashing witness pay is the best idea, perhaps electing witnesses that prefer to only take as much as they need for their projects and service rather than just being greedy and trying to drain the whole value.
People Re-investing what they don't need is something we need to try and make common place with witnesses. Transparency on all ends is needed for everything to run properly in my opinion.
We should elect witnesses who deliver the most value to the network. There is plenty of work to be done supporting, improving, building, and building upon this platform. No reason we can't find just 19 (plus some runner-up) witnesses who are all absolutely great.