Recently, I saw an article from @blocktrades saying that 90 Day Steem Power delegations were up for sale again. And having a very small amount of SP, I immediately considered purchasing some. But I wondered whether it was actually profitable to do so via making posts and upvoting yourself.

Just to be clear, I am NOT endorsing spamming. What I'm talking about is making one post every day and upvoting it, and using the rest of the voting power for others' posts.

How Much Does SP Delegation Cost?

I tested out how much a 1 SP delegation costed in various cryptocurrencies, and found that 1 SP delegation was valued at about $0.44, which is about 10 times cheaper than buying SP. Here is the data I got, for those wondering:

Cryptocurrency	Cost of 1 SP Delegation (in crypto)	Cost of 1 SP Delegation (in USD)
Steem Dollars	0.109 SBD	$0.47
Steem	0.115 STEEM	$0.44
Ethereum	0.00054 ETH	$0.44
Litecoin	0.003 LTC	$0.43
Bitcoin	0.000054 BTC	$0.43

Sort of interestingly, it is cheaper to buy it in certain cryptocurrencies. Do note that this data is subject to change, so don't rely on its accuracy.

So it is relatively cheap to purchase an SP delegation. But should you do it?

SP Delegation Profitability

So, according to SteemNow, a website by @penguinpablo, 1 SP increases your 100% upvote value by about $0.000278, which is pretty minuscule. I can vouch for the accuracy of the site, as it predicts my upvote value correctly, but beware that these values are all theoretical.

So if you buy an approximate 9 SP delegation for 1 SBD, your upvote value will increase by about 0.0025, or a quarter of a cent. This may not be a very attractive amount, but to increase your upvote value by a cent only costs about 4-5 SBD, which in my opinion is pretty cool, but compared to buying an upvote from a bot (about $8-10 upvote), it isn't that great.

But will you be able to earn back the SBD you spent before the 90 days have passed? Probably not.

If you spend about 10 SBD and get about 90 SP delegation which increases your vote value by $0.025, and you make one post or comment every day and upvote it, you will only (approximately) earn back a measly 1 SBD and about 0.2 STEEM (depending on the exchange rate).

So to make a profit, your will need to upvote yourself about 10 times a day, which really sucks. And even then, your voting power decreasing may not make even this profitable.

Reasons To Do It?

Well, if you look through my transfers, you'll find that I actually did buy some SP delegation. To be honest, I made a mistake when calculating profitability... But besides profitability, here are a few reasons to buy:

• Motivation to write: The fact that you're wasting upvote power that you paid for, is enough motivation (for me at least) to write daily.
• Helping the community: Being able to upvote people at a higher value allows me to have more say in finding and rewarding niche and underrated content.
• More Curation Rewards: The increase in curation rewards is probably not much, but it's something...

However, here are a few counterarguments:

• Motivation to write: There are better ways to motivate yourself to write that don't involve you losing your money.
• Helping the community: More helpful to buy upvotes from a bot for people.
• More Curation Rewards: Yeah, these aren't worth much...

TL;DR:

Nah, not really profitable. Unless you spam/make 10 comments everyday and upvote them. But even then, your upvote power decreases the more you upvote, so it may not even be profitable then.

So all in all, I wouldn't recommend this if you're looking to grow your account. BlockTrades will have to make SP Delegations about 5-10 times cheaper for users to profit without self-upvote spamming. But I can see how they would want to prevent this service from being abused by spammers.

As I said earlier, I did buy about 90 SP delegation, and will make a new post after the 90 days to review it.

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