Tracking Proof of Brain Difficulty (Why your rewards are going down!)

Background

Over the past few months, I've been keeping tabs on the status of the rewards pool as part of my daily investor report. A problem in the rewards pool would be a significant concern for any investor or trader. As part of that, I've also been collecting data on the recent_claims value which is a variable that tracks cumulative claims (votes) against the rewards pool over the past 30 days. This value is used to compute how much of the rewards pool is distributed each day according to the following formula:

reward_per_rshare = reward_balance / recent_claims

Therefore, by tracking recent_claims, we can keep a tab on how difficult it is to earn STEEM from your 'Proof of Brain' (posts).

Charting the Data

Analysis

Between July 2017 and today, recent_claims has increased by 259% which means that it takes about 2.5 times the voting power to distribute a similar amount of STEEM from the rewards pool. The increase has been amazing linear most likely due to the 30 day look-back period of recent_claims. The difficulty increase does appear to correlate well to the increase in the total amount of votes which has increased by an averaged amount of 2.72 over the same period of time. The number of active users has also increased in a similar manner with approximately 2.8 times the number of daily active users now as in the beginning of July 2017.

The rewards pool has been fairly stable over the same period of time indicating that recent_claims is doing a good job regulating the rewards pool reserve. Now lets talk about the part that is actually impact the rewards you see on your posts.

STEEM Price to Difficulty Differential

The part that really impacts what you see in your post rewards and your take home pay if you were to pull your rewards out immediately is the difference between the price of STEEM and the recent_claims value. The chart at the bottom of my graphic illustrates this:

When Times Were Rough

When recent_claims is rising but the STEEM price (represented by market cap) is flat, you are receiving less STEEM per post and therefore less money as we saw between October and December of 2017. The differential is indicated by the left red vertical line on the chart.

Gold Rush!!!

When the STEEM market cap increases faster than recent_claims, you are still receiving less STEEM per post but your posts are worth so much more that you just don't care!!! When the market cap jumped from $250 million to $1.75 billion from November 2017 to January 2018, you were receiving 7 times more $USD per STEEM but 15% less STEEM for an equal amount of voting power. I bet you didn't notice!

This is shown on the chart by the money making smiley face and the green arrow on the bottom chart.

Where We Are Now

We are now back to the down days where the market cap is falling and recent_claims continues to rise. Hang in there, as long as the price of STEEM recovers and continues to rise with recent_claims, everything will be okay. Remember that rewards earned during down times will be worth far more later if you power them up and hold onto them. I remember earning $1 on posts back in March 2017 which are now $20 posts because I powered up those rewards when STEEM was $0.10.

Become a SmartSTEEM vote seller

It is a great way to reinvest your current earnings in a post promotion service that demands quality from vote buyers. I set it up so my votes are only sold to users with great content, not spammers or plagiarizers. (referral link below)

Data Credit:

Coinmarketcap.com
@penguinpablo Daily Report
Steemd.com