I think it is too early to make huge changes to accomodate merchants, especially in the form of a hard peg of SBDs back to $1 USD which will negatively impact other important stakeholders. One of our main focuses should be on retention of active users and rewarding quality content at all levels. I think this could be done by further incentivising curation. We need whales, orcas and dolphins doing more curation on a wider basis, and I am not talking about more paid upvote bots. I don't know how it can be done. Maybe making curation rewards pay out in a 50/50 split of Steem/SBD? Increasing curation percentage? Once we have brought in a greater number of users who are actually able to see their earnings (hopefully largely in the form of Steem Power) grow and therefore remain active on the platform and people actually have liquid SBD or Steem to spend, then let's talk about merchants. If we reach that level of maturity we should be thinking less in terms of the fiat value of our tokens and the concern of that fiat/token price volatility becomes less of an issue, doesn't it? I am no economist but those are my thoughts.
In summary, we have let the SBD cat out of the bag. A hard peg to the dollar, especially a sudden one is going to make people leave and less people join. The result will be that the curators and merchants will have fewer people to do business with.
Great comment. You've already touched on one of my proposed solutions, and that is even if we do nothing about the peg we could make the curation reward a 50/50 split of STEEM/SBD and it would help that Stakeholder group.
I agree that pegging back SBD to $1 USD right now will piss off a lot of people, who might leave. But what if it was (properly) pegged to a higher amount? Why can't we have a stable currency for the merchants AND make sure the Authors don't lose out from it?
Yes!
This is a great idea!
Steem on!
That's all very reasonable I think. Making such huge changes right is against everybody's interest. I've even made a little image to help visualize it:
And as far as cutting the merchants out goes, they are not here yet for us to be cutting them out. SBD is not seeing any significant commerce (meta businesses are obviously not counted) so there are no real businesses in that sphere that need protecting yet.
Everyone likes to frame this as a free market issue, but it's a red herring.
It's like a company exec refusing to review and grant Christmas bonuses for employees because he wants to let the free market sort it out.
It's not about protecting merchants, it's about attracting them so that STEEM can go to the next level. Do we ever want to be more than just a social network? The original design and the whitepaper showed visions of being so much more.
Viewing this as an entirely free market might be a bit simplistic but it's much more accurate than comparing this to a company as here the prices are indeed set by the market, not by the management. Attempting to force an asset on the blockchain into submission would not attract merchants on its own. What would attract merchants would be scale and a market opportunity and what could fuel our growth to that level would be the social network aspect. SBD has spent a lot of its existence being stable, how many merchants has that managed to attract?
Also, the original design is not and should not be regarded as the only thing with looking at - after all we are having this conversation because it did not work as expected...
The rewards are set by management. The price feeds are set by management. The interest rates and the bias are set by management.
It is still early, but I almost bought a car on here using SBD. I also asked a merchant here if I could pay with SBD and while I had to use BTC I think they have since started accepting SBD. I was looking at getting some of my local small businesses on here so I could buy coffees and bread with SBD, but I've given up on that idea now.
Why would anyone use SBD today? May as well just keep using BTC or ETH if we have to take a currency speculation risk while the transaction takes place.
But the market price isn't. And that's the most important thing. If you can't set the price, you are not the CEO setting the salary by any means and the metaphor breaks down completely.
That's awesome! Good on you for spreading the word like that! :)
Well, most businesses wouldn't use SBD regardless of it being pegged or not right now. It's just that the Steem blockchain is not yet popular, recognized and large enough. I have faith in it and it's future and I think the fact that it's technologically superior will at some point start playing a part in its competitiveness. But we have a lot of growing to do before we can achieve that and implementing the hard peg now would stifle that instead of enhance it.
We can implement a hard peg when the market value is the same as the artificial value we want to implement. Otherwise we are going to willingly and intentionally wipe out a lot of value from our blockchain which also means portraying ourselves as less trustworthy.
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has just come out and said they will be accepting a "trusted" crypto that isn't Bitcoin. Could you imagine what it would mean to this platform if it was SBD? Fast, cheap micro-transactions we can do....
STEEM was recently rated by Weiss in the Top 3 of all cryptos. We aren't very far away at all.
That's great news either way! Let's see if the crytos they choose are pegged. I bet they will choose freely traded ones ;) But Steem would be perfect for something like that with the practically instant transactions and with its lack of any fees.