What to do with an investment in STEEM?
STEEM is back down to around $1 so I'm considering investing some money into it. I have invested about $1,000 so far and since I'm very bullish on the future of this platform and the STEEM token I am planning to invest around $5,000 or so more. I wish I could invest more, but I already have a bunch in BTC and ETH which I don't want to sell and I have a family to feed!
Anyway, this might seem like a silly question - but I'm not sure what to do with the STEEM when/if I buy more! One of the main reasons that I like STEEM is that you can use it to earn more STEEM rather than just letting it sit there waiting for the price to increase. So what I'm really asking is what is the best way to use an investment in STEEM to earn the highest possible return.
While this is an important question for me - I also think it's an important question for everyone here. We don't just need more people to sign up and post to make this a success, we need more people to invest too. So it's important to understand what an investment in STEEM gets you and how you can maximize your returns. If the public at large saw the amazing investment opportunity STEEM presents the price would be MUCH higher than it is now - which is what we want!
With that in mind, here are the options I'm aware of in no particular order:
- Power up my STEEM into SP and use it to upvote my posts and comments (as well as others!)
- Power up my STEEM into SP and lease it to others via @minnowbooster (for more info see @jerrybanfield's excellent post on the subject)
- Use my STEEM to lease SP from @minnowbooster to upvote my posts and comments (as well as others!)
- Purchase SBD and use it to promote my posts (via upvote bots/services, not the promotion feature)
- Something else I don't even know about!
Let's consider each option...
1. Power up my STEEM into SP and use it to upvote
I don't know much about how the math works behind upvoting - it would be great if someone has a link with some details on that! Anyway let's assume I purchase a total of 5,000 SP. Using this voting calculator https://www.steemnow.com/upvotecalc.html (very handy tool btw, thanks to @penguinpablo!) it looks like I can generate $0.58 per full-power 100% upvote. My understanding is that each 100% upvote reduces your voting power by 2% and it takes 2.4 hours for that to regenerate.
That means that you can cast one 100% upvote every 2.4 hours - which is what most of the upvoting bots do. So this comes to 10 100% upvotes / day, so if I cast them all for my own posts (not saying I will do this - just doing a thought exercise!) then it should add $5.80 of rewards to my posts each day. Now 25% of that goes to curation rewards so that leaves $4.35 for me each day from my 5,000 SP investment.
If my math is right (which I'm not sure it is) then that could generate around 35% returns on the SP per year, which is pretty good. The downsides are that I need to post at least 10 things a day - which should be easy including comments - and vote approximately every 2.4 hours.
I distinctly remember a post by @jerrybanfield (I think?) which talked about returns from exactly this method being much higher, something like doubling your SP every 6 months or so, but for the life of me I can't find it. Anyway again would appreciate anyone letting me know if I'm totally wrong here!
2. Power up my STEEM into SP and lease it to others
As I mentioned above, @jerrybanfield has an excellent post on the subject so I don't need to write anything more about it here! tl;dr you get a fixed 24% APR leasing SP and it requires a little work to renew your leases every month but definitely far less than posting and upvoting every day. Definitely a great return for a mostly passive investment!
3. Use my STEEM to lease SP from others
This is the opposite of #2. It seems the going rate for leasing SP is 150 SP / 1 STEEM for 4 weeks. This means with an investment of 5,000 STEEM I could potentially lease 750,000 SP! Again using the voting calculator that should be me about $87 per upvote or around $650 in rewards per day after factoring in curation rewards?!? If used to full extent for 4 weeks that would lead to total rewards of over $18,000 on a $5,000 investment?!?
The issue with this is probably that it will be hard to actually lease 750,000 SP, but if the above is correct (someone check my math please!) it seems worth a shot!
UPDATE
As @cryptogainer helpfully pointed out - it's 150 SP per STEEM per WEEK, so that means with a 5,000 STEEM investment I could lease 187,500 SP for 4 weeks, NOT 750,000. Big difference. That's why I wanted someone to check my math!
So that means my 100% upvote would get $21.66 in rewards for a total of only about $4,500 over the 4 week period - so a loss there actually. Of course this doesn't count the possibility of that $21.66 upvote getting your post seen and upvoted by more people and earning more rewards overall. That part is very hard to estimate!
4. Purchase SBD and use it to promote my posts
I have been doing this a little bit so far, spending around $10 - $15 SBD per post and it seems to be a pretty successful way to get my content in front of some people. There are a TON of upvoting bots and services, but the best ones i've found have been @minnowbooster (again) and @booster. The problem is that these services only get you so far - @minnowbooster has a max of $15 SBD per week and most of the others are on a bidding system and many don't have that much voting power anyway.
I think I will probably get a little bit of SBD to do some of this in addition to the other options discussed here. Also it's always good to have some SBD lying around to tip people or run contests or just make it rain! Of course if you tried to "make it rain" with STEEM it would probably just float up to the sky and form a cloud...then I guess it would eventually condense and fall back down as rain...but wow I'm really off topic here! Moving on...
5. Something else I don't even know about!
I've done a LOT of reading about STEEM in the past few weeks, but I'm still relatively new to the whole thing so it's quite possible there's something (or many things) I've missed! Luckily there's this nifty comments section here so I'd love to hear from you! Yes, you - hit that reply button. If I end up leasing 750k SP maybe I'll throw some upvotes your way!
This is interesting as I'm at the other side of this now. I bought steem last year (sadly on the big ride down) and after a year on steemit have recently pulled some out to see investment returns elsewhere.
I hit my goal of 10K SP and then have pulled out some. Bottom line is as much as I love steem, its my largest holding YET my worst performer over the past year.
So took some steem in to btc and invested a chunk in Bitconnect which is providing me a 1% daily return on my investment. It's crazy and I know at some point this thing will probably crash, but in the meantime I'm going to collect as much $ as I can. Be good so far.
Hi @yabapmatt,
Very interesting post.
I have ''invested'' in upvotes but most of them cannot scale or give you negative ROI after cutarion rewards and 7 days.
The best return on investment on Steemit , I think, is @bellyrubbank. He pays 45% APR. But there is no curation reward deductions or anything Steemit like.
Otherwise I invest in crypto clould mining at Genesis Mining with returns from 7 to 15% pm. But remember you don't get your initial investment back
PS. Creating your own upvote bot might also be an option. You get paid to do upvotes and you earn curation rewards from each upvote you make. :)
Yes investing in upvotes will generally give you a negative direct ROI, however the idea is that if you can get your posts on the trending page then you will get more visibility and more real upvotes and followers which should give it a positive ROI overall, although indirectly.
I will check out @bellyrubbank, haven't hear of that. Would be good to create a site that lists all of the different bots and services running on Steem!
I looked into cloud mining but didn't want to make the investment - glad it's working out for you!
Funny you mention it because I am actually working on my own bot right now. The issue with making my own upvote bot is that for it to be any good it needs to have a lot of SP which I can't give it right now. I have a different idea though which I will post about when/if I ever finish it, so stay tuned!
This a great post! I am currently going through a similar thought process in terms of where to invest my steem(but on a smaller scale). I think the solution is to power up your steem and impliment #1 and #2 so if your upvotes do not make you much the constant 24% apr on the steem power should make up for it.
Seems to me powering up + being active is the best way to go
As far as I am informed correctly you can get 75 SP for 1 STEEM / 1 week. If you want to lease 4 weeks or more you pay 4 STEEM (1 STEEM per week) / 4 weeks for 150SP.
Ah, I think you are right...#mathfail (is that a thing?) I'm going to see if I can edit the post.
Nice investment tips! I use 1. 2. and 4.! I want to invest more to increase my passive income with 2.
Upvoted
Yea what's interesting is that from what I can tell #3 would be by far the most profitable, have you ever considered leasing SP?
I've never thought about it before, but if your math's right, I have to lease SP right now.
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Have a great day!
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