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.
Considering there are currently no real pegged cryptos that have fast transactions and low/zero fees....it's a pretty safe call.