RE: What's The Point of the SBD Peg?
Because of the high SBD, the curation on this platform is completely broken. Since curation rewards are paid out in SP and not in SBD it highly punished anyone who is willing to put efforts into proper curation on this platform. The rise of the SBD came along with the explosion of bid bots and vote selling since it's by far the best thing anyone with a lot of SP can do. It asks no time and earns a whole lot more. As a result, wales are much less willing to support mainly dolphins who now need to buy the bigger upvotes and are forced to sell their own votes to be able to pay for it. This means they are less willing and able to support many of the minnows who also need to buy upvotes. So the system where curation makes higher quality posts stand out no longer works.
Having a stable currency linked to the steem platform would allow real life adoption as it can be used to actually pay for things in a predictable way. This real life use it what gives sustainable value to something. Right now the only thing that keeps the price up is the fact that new people join who are willing to buy up the steem that is being created each day. I don't believe this model is sustainable longer term.
This is best answer by far. Agree 100%
Thanks @cibar !
I wrote an article about it last month so the reply was ready to go. Could have gone in much more detail though. The thing that actually worries me the most about the situation is that there is no statement whatsoever from the devs (for as far as I know). Not about high SBD, the broken curation, the broken trending page, the bid-bot situation, the @haejin situation, ... I'm hoping Hardfork 20 wil fix a lot of these issues somehow.
+1
I responded before reading this but I agree this is the best answer.
Stability can be achieved at a higher value... the point you make on number 1 is fair, but in all fairness curation rewards are so low that unless steem would rise inactivity would insue.
I dont like bidbots or the trending page anymore than you do, but I prefer to earn more rewards in USD terms than cap. I would make it stable at a higher number.
I don't think your first point adequately addresses why we care about the peg. I think it only addresses how incentives change when you compare the SBD portion of the reward vs the STEEM portion. If steem price goes up the market value of the SBD portion goes up, and all else remains exactly the same.
Edit: oops, I'm dumb. The ratio of the two is preserved. Nevermind that point lol.
-- second edit: this is a really good point I must not have understood earlier, thanks for that.
Sorry, second question about the first point, which I think @spiritualmax briefly touched on. Even if there peg were working, doesn't the same problem remain? Low effort to roll in the dough so why bother curating at all if you can sit back and let the good times roll in? Meaning, the dynamic of choosing one over the other is certainly more pronounced with higher SBD, but it isn't the main incentive for the behavior in the first place.