The market value of Steem is linked to the quality of content on the block chain, and 1/2 of author and curation rewards are locked away in steem power for up to 13 weeks.
What will that $980 or $210 per day - along with the sizeable investment that lets those voters earn those returns - be worth in 13 weeks if everyone here is only voting for their own content without concern for quality? OTOH, what will the $120 per day from curating be worth in a year or 5 or 10 years if people are voting for the best quality content they can find on the block chain in order to attract users and investors?
$980 per day becomes much less attractive when you realize that you can only liquidate $490 of it immediately, and you're getting it by pursuing a strategy that devalues your large investment in steempower.
Hi Steve, there is not doubt that curation should be the best practice from ethical point of view. But the comparison is based on purely financial point of view. I couldn't understand the reason for such a gap between curation reward and self voting reward.
Those who invested hundred thousands on steem power here are for staying long term. As you know the previously the power down took 2 years, now it takes only 13 weeks. So I guess it doesn't matter for them if it takes 13 weeks to liquidate.
Thanks for your opinion.
Hi, I'm not addressing the ethical aspect. I'm addressing their perceived self-interest. Your example accounts have about 500k and 200k steem power, respectively. That's worth about $850k and $300k. If they follow a voting strategy that leads to devaluation of their investment by 10%, they lose $85k and $34k to offset whatever they earned by self-voting. What if they devalue their investment by 20, 50 or even 80%? That's a whole lot of value to risk for a comparatively small return.
I'm not saying that self-voting never makes financial sense, just that the market places a limit on how much self-voting can be used. Exclusive self-voting is not a sustainable strategy because self voting can only succeed for as long as there is enough authoring and curating going on to prop up the price of Steem.
Hi, thanks for your inputs. By referring devaluation, did you mean the price decline of steem or declining reward pool? If you are referring to steem price, I don't think it will depend on individual users action, rather its a community effort. There are some self declared self-voter on that community, but that doesn't stop coming of new users and making good quality content.
If you are referring to the declining reward pool that we all noticed after HF19, then its not declining anymore. I have noticed the reward is not declining by time even the steem price is not fluctuating much.
By no means I am supporting exclusive self voting. I just don't understand why there such a huge gap between rewards. If my calculation is nearly correct, steemit should fill the gap as early as possible.
I do mean the price of steem, and you're right it doesn't depend directly on an individual's action, but on the aggregate of all user actions. When there is a high ratio of self-vote/curation, we should probably expect to see the price of steem go down. Whales do have more influence on that aggregate than minnows.
If I understand your question, the gap between rewards is probably because the self-voter collects author rewards and curation rewards, but the curator only gets curation rewards. They could close the gap by posting some comments or articles and getting author rewards via upvotes from others.
I have also seen a post suggesting an increase in the curation reward percentage. That wouldn't eliminate the gap, but it would shrink it.
Good point @remlaps! tiny minnow observation