RE: Another Puzzle: Why is the blockchain's reported median price higher than the actual price of STEEM?
That is a very good question that I have always wanted to look into. So now is the chance ;-))
I can only reconstruct this as far as the chain calculates it. The code has already been discussed in your linked post.
The market cap of all SBD should not exceed 10 % of the combined market cap. Once this percentage is exceeded, the minimum price does not fall further. A further drop in the price would increase the total market cap and thus lead to the printing of more SBD.
| price | virtual_supply | sbd_percent | print SBD |
|---|---|---|---|
| $0.22 | 487,000,000 STEEM | 9.86 % | yes |
| $0.15 | 513,000,000 STEEM | 9.36 % | yes |
However, printing more SBD would again lead to an increase in the total market cap and so on.
It would be interesting to know why the value was set at 10% for the price limit. I have not found any information on this. At the introduction of HF 14, this 10 % has already been set.
It is only remarkable that with HF20 the threshold for the printing pause were adjusted to this limit. Before that, they were much lower. The increase was surely better for the users, but the debt rate rose faster this way (even if no one could really imagine it at the time). There was an extensive discussion on this.
Oh yes, the limitation of the median_price could also be related to the possibility of manipulation by the witnesses. I once read a thought on this, but I can't find it right now...
Oh, that helps to jog my memory. Here was the post that started it all, Steem Dollar Stability Enhancements, and here are the HF14 release notes. And, yeah, it's there in the release notes, sort-of...
And now I see where this came from in the comments of the first post, Steem Dollars have Limits.
Not sure, but my guess is that those percentages were just someone's hunch for reasonable values to use. I wonder if they also implemented that 0.01% rule. I don't see that in the release notes, and I don't remember hearing about it, so maybe not.
P.S. That discussion is painful. Herding cats. ; -)
Thank you for the links. I need to read more from him.
I don't think this has been implemented. I haven't noticed that in the code either so far. Maybe there is still some information from Dan somewhere. The release notes only describe the minimum price.
But we may conclude that the limits were introduced with very good reasons. And all those who complain that no more SBD are printed should bear in mind that more is not always good!
BTW: At first I thought the idea of forced conversion was not so bad...