RE: Where Does the Money in Steem Come From?
The video is informative , short and succinct! I think its going to be quite difficult to retain the dollar sign representing the actual value soon. I still fear that in the long run, it is not better to just reward people as much actual value they bring to the site and pay a percentage slice from that added value?
At the moment, the value of an author reward is roughly 1/3rd of the displayed dollar amount.
(Post Value x 75% )/2 = SBD payout
The other half is paid in STEEM power which is essentially locked up for 2 years.
The fallacy here is that the steem power paid out is quoted in dollar value when it is almost impossible to ascertain what value steem is going to have 2 years from now. A more accurate calculation of steem power shouldn't be "The value of steem power if it were converted to dollars on the fly at today's prices of steem / btc" because the nature of this particular asset is such that there is a maturity date set some what far in the future.
In that case, we can only extrapolate and speculate what the value of steem may be 2 years later.
TLDR; Steem power should not be counted towards to the dollar value payout of the reward. Dollar rewards should be adjusted to just SBD / SP because pegging the price of the dollar gives unrealistic notions of how much reward is being handed out vs how much a person actually receives.
I believe what is displayed is just the author rewards so you get 50% of what is shown on the post in SBD. I agree it may feel a bit misleading to new users, but people are getting the dollar value in Steem power so technically it makes sense. I think it's ok, but if too many people feel otherwise perhaps it can be changed.
It's hard to objectively quantify value on the Internet. Businesses and online advertisers will try to estimate value based on traffic, but there are still uncertainties about the quality and relevance of traffic. There is also a long lead time before popular content online is recognized on search engines and generates a lot of traffic. That's why subjective measures like the way the system works now is fairly good and members are able to curate unique quality content more quickly.
BTW your English and grasp of all these technical concepts is incredible. It's as if English is your native language. I read your last insightful post re: livestreaming vs. Steemit. Cheers.
The larger reward figures are a good marketing tactic though. Sure, they're slightly deceptive, but they're not actually wrong. The more people see these larger amounts of money, the more they'll be motivated to take part.