Can you sustain a SP lease without Self-Upvoting?

This is a very subjective topic, mainly because there is a percieved credibility score if you have a lof of STEEM POWER, and hence a higher upvote value, which in tern gains you a greater level of social acceptance here on Steemit, regardless of whether that SP is your own, or leased delegation from somewhere like @blocktrades or @minnowbooster.

Let's cut through the subjective part of how it gets you more followers, and gets others to upvote your content on their autovoters etc... Let's just do a few calculations to answer the numerical side of things: Is Leasing SP worth it from a numbers point of view?

We'll work with the current state of the coingecko.com price of SBD = $10.60, STEEM = $1.89, and the previous @minnowbooster pricing (before the bid pricing was enabled) of 1 STEEM per 185 SP per week for a 4 week lease, and we'll spend 14 STEEM ot get a lease of 647.5 SP.

Using @penguinpablo's upvote calculator we see that an increase of 645.7SP equaltes to in increase in your upvote value of $0.10.

So how many posts or comments of other users would we have to 100% upvote in 28 days, in order to recoup that 14 STEEM to be able to renew the lease purely with the increased curation reward from the extra $0.10 upvote value?

We'll use 2 scenarios:

1. Curation only - can you earn enough from curation to renew your SP lease?
2. How many times would I need to upvote my own post to get my 14 STEEM back?

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Curation Rewards:

Here is what the curation rewards woudl look like:

In order to earn enough curation rewards, and earn 14 STEEM POWER (which would have to be powered down) to renew your lease, and assuming on average you would earn your 25% slice of your upvote back, you would need to 100% upvote 1058.4 posts or comments in 28 days, or 37.8 each day. Given that your 24 hour recharge rate only allows 10 100% upvotes in 24 hours, you would not be able to earn your 14 STEEM back purely with curation rewards.

It looks like you may need to upvote yourself, doesn't it?

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Self Upvotes:

Here is what your self-upvote rewards would look like:

Remember, we're only interested in getting our 14 STEEM back using the additional upvote value our leased SP has given us.

A 100% instant self-upvote would result in an author reward of 0.05 SBD and 0.0945 SP, which would need to be powered down if it was to be used to renew your SP lease. At the current SBD price of STEEM you would be able to purchase 0.280 of STEEM with your SBD reward, for a total of 0.375 STEEM per upvote. If you kept the STEEM POWER and only used your SBD, you would have 0.280 STEEM per upvote

You would therefore need to 100% upvote yourself 37.34 Times in 28 Days using the full reward (SBD + SP) for your lease, or 49.9 times if only using your SBD rewards. This translates to 1.33 or 1.78 self-upvotes per day respectively. That's between 13 and 18 percent of your daily upvote allowance.

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What does it mean? Is leasing SP good or bad?

Well, it's neither good nor bad. Financially your would be running at a loss, unless you used your delegation to boost your social profile, and in turn draw a bigger following who will upvote your post more, and get you greater rewards.

Regardless of whether having having a higher upvote value gives you a social advantage on its own, to sustain your lease of STEEM power without spending any of your other rewards, you would need to upvote yourself at least 13 percent of the time. Leasing delegated SP does require self-voting in order to be able to sustain itself without dipping into the rewards earned from your own STEEM POWER.

In the long run, you may benefit socially and have a greater influence, or draw more upvotes from others. You may also not be able to grow your own supply of STEEM POWER because you are spending it all on your SP lease. This has a lot more to do with your social interaction, engagement with others, and the quality of your posts and comments.

Any way you look at it, you will still need to put up good content to draw the bigger upvotes and grow your own SP balance, whether you lease SP or not... Or, you can sit in a corner and continually upvote yourself.

With the coming HF20 working on reducing the reverse auction time from 30 minutes to 15, and returning the missed curation rewards back to the rewards pool instead of rewarding the author, those instant self-upvotes are going to be worth a lot less than they are now. I'm looking forward to seeing how this changes things.

Those are the numbers for today. Have a good one y'all!!