How much are you getting paid next week?

For many people with jobs, this is an easy question to answer. Tediously predictable in some cases. Many freelancers and self-employed people might not be sure, but they work at improving the certainty. It helps to be able to pay bills regularly and know that you're still going to have enough to pay for food!

Sidebar: remember Steemit is not just about earning a living, it's also about relating to others and building community, but this post is mostly about the earning a living bit.

Here on Steemit, we have a different kind of working relationship. So the answer here is "it depends". It depends on the number of posts I will make and the performance of those posts in a reverse auction together with thousands of other potential participants who wil share in a fluctuating reward pool of magic made-up internet money.

Factors that may influence the post's performance include: the quality of the post (whatever that means), the time of day it is published, whether a certain whale likes you, whether that certain whale is taking a voting holiday, your length of time and popularity on the platform, influence score, voting power, followers/visibility, whether it gets resteemed or not, how many people have you on their auto-vote list etc. , etc.

And then there's what you can do with your "earnings" once they've been paid to you.

The pool of goods and services payable in Steem or SBD is still very small. There are things that I could by with SBD (and sharing it around is a good way of building community) but there are few things that I want and need in everyday life that I can pay for this way. My mortgage, utility bills, cinema, optician, public transport - none of them take Steem yet :) Which is a shame because it's like cash, there are still no transfer fees.

I can sell my SBD/Steem for Bitcoin but the problem is similar. There are probably some local businesses and individuals near me who take BTC (or would like to) but ultimately I'm going to have to sell my BTC for GBP (cos that's where I live - GB Pound Land).

All this exchanging costs commission and transaction frees and so takes away from my earnings and introduces another couple of sources of uncertainty - 1) I don't know how many BTC I'm going to get for my SBD and 2) I don't know how many GBP I'm going to get for my BTC. Plus I will need to account for my BTC sales as income when I do my taxes. I'm thinking now about how to reduce the risk of this volatility.

So yeah. Next time you ask me "how much will you earn on Steemit next week?" I will probably palm you off with my actual earnings over the last period and fingers crossed it will be the same or more in future.