Life on the Knife's Edge

Recent discussions concerning the dust threshold naturally led to knowing if a comment was actually going to pay or not. There's a little bit of confusion regarding this threshold because many observers have noticed that the payout amount on the website was well over the two cent threshold, but still didn't pay out. Why?

Let me tell you what's happening.

Whenever a vote occurs, the backend computes at that moment what the value of the votes on that post are worth. Remember it is affected by:

1. Feed price (median USD price of STEEM set by top 21 witnesses, taking median over 3.5 days)
2. Vote value relative to total vote value.
3. Amount of STEEM in rewards pool.

These are sorted in order of how quickly they change, and really the main thing that's noticeable is effect of the feed price on the payout.

Here is the important part: the value computed and displayed on the website is frozen until the next vote, and can only serve as an estimate. It would be prohibitively expensive to continuously update the pending_payout for every post and comment, so it makes sense, but perhaps we can change the websites to compute this on the fly.

To illustrate, let's say that on day 1 you get a vote, and let's say the website shows it as 0.02. But it will stay this way until another vote happens or until payout! It is not safe to read what the website is showing, especially in times of high price fluctuation.

To know how to compute the current value of the vote, you can do so by pulling data from steemd. Let's do an example.

I will use

https://steemd.com/newbiegames/@jan23com/re-johndoer123-pick-a-panel-contest-20180412t030915713z

since we were going to use it as a test to confirm behavior.

Note the rshares is 4,607,112,884. This shows the weight of the votes assigned to the comment.

Now go to https://steemd.com and scroll down to where the section with the reward fund is.

Take the recent claims, which is 438,982,750,788,960,641, which is the weight of all recent votes.

Take the reward balance, which is 749,780.858 STEEM, this is the per block reward that changes according to a fixed schedule of inflation, so it slowly changes.

Take the feed price, which is 2.669 SBD.

Now compute

(rshares/claims) x rewardbalance x price

And that's what the current value of your post or comment is. In the case of this post, it is

4,607,112,884/438,982,750,788,960,641749,780.8582.669 = 0.021

For now... If feed price remain stable for an additional day, it will remain above 0.02 and it will pay out.

Hope this helps clears up some confusion I've been seeing about this threshold. And apologies if you saw the title and were expecting something completely different!

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