As you may already know, the rewards pool for Steemit is set in terms of STEEM, and there is a fixed amount of inflation set by the blockchain. And you may also know that the value of your posts depends on votes, and more notably from votes from accounts with higher STEEM POWER. In fact you may already now be confident in computing your payouts from this post with nice graphics.

But did you know the value assigned to your post is in terms of STEEM*, and the number displayed in the Steemit website is this value multiplied by the price feed?

There is already plenty of confusion with the payouts, and many posts have tried to clear this up, and you can see the computation on Steem Supply, but one common mistake from those that are following such posts is that they think that the STEEM price going up is a bad thing for payouts, where in fact it is just the opposite.

And the other inference we can make from this is that STEEM price controls SBD inflation rate (and it is proportional!)

Exercise

Just try the following exercise:

1. After your post becomes stable (like after 3 days), take the amount you see on your payout, and divide it by the STEEM price feed which you can find on Steemd, and it looks like this:
   One thing to be aware of here is that this lags behind market prices since this is averaged over 3.5 days.
2. After your payout, assuming you did not get any further vote adjustments, now take the value from (1), and multiply by that day's feed price, which may have changed in that amount of time. You should get what's then displayed in the website.

*More Accurate Exercise

One caveat here is that it still might vary a little bit because the value of your posts are actually in something called vests, and for example this post covers how that works. If you wanted this exercise to be perfect, then you should also translate STEEM to MVESTS by dividing by the steem_per_mvests parameter. Then converting back later, you would multiply by the feed_price and the steem_per_mvests value.

The reason I believe STEEM is good enough is that the steem_per_mvests parameters seems to be slowly varying based on amount of power-ups happening and such (though I don't fully understand the mechanics of this yet).

Summary

• If you want a numeric value for your posts that is not so sensitive to price fluctuations, track it in terms of STEEM. (And then keep in mind that half of that converts to SBD, the amount of which determined by multiplying by the feed_price again)
• STEEM Price going up is a good thing for payday!
• This post goes over the code walkthrough for the claims in this post as well.

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