Good article. A few points.
Your graph 2.4, the Change in SBD Supply, is a sum of two processes; it may be useful to unpick the SBD Creation, through rewards, and SBD Conversions to STEEM. If possible, I'd look at it weekly, then can see more clearly what has been happening.
Indeed, when the SBD debt ratio reached 5%, the SBD Print rate dropped to zero, but conversions were not as obvious (or profitable) as now because the market price of SBD was $1 +/- 5 cents. However, it can be seen even on the monthly chart that the SBD supply was coming down during that period, albeit slowly.
The increase to 10% debt ratio has made the current situation worse. I saw no good reason to do so, and we are now seeing the obvious consequences. It merely restarted the SBD printing presses until we hit the new ceiling. I thought it would happen much earlier, but we did not see an SBD price hike as we had at the start of the year.
Also, converting SBD into STEEM remains profitable, but users have to be very careful at the moment as the official blockchain price is very close to the STEEM/SBD rate on the internal market. The trade of selling STEEM for SBD then converting that SBD back into STEEM has been profitable recently; at the moment it only yields a few percentage points, and we know how volatile prices can be.
I don't quite understand your last paragraph, though.
In my mind, all the SBD tokens that exist right now have actually reduced the supply of STEEM in the early parts of 2018 and have helped maintain a high price for STEEM...
Thanks @rycharde you make some really good points which are helpful to the overall understanding and I welcome your comments as you have some great knowledge around this topic. Do you think that making those few percentage points profit from conversion is worth it, if it just leads to such a dramatic increase in supply of STEEM (perhaps most people's key investment).
Yes that sentence is a little confusing and lacks a bit more narrative - I'm going to remove that to avoid any confusion for future readers. I don't keep my SBD and I don't see a lot of use for it at the moment - my mindset is convert to STEEM (and power up).
On your first point: really good point:
I agree this would be really useful. I may need some help with the data extraction. My go to person for data extraction/ analytics is @paulag : I think she will see this ping and I will contact her in the new year - to see if this is data is something she could extract when she is back from festive break. Paula does some brilliant analysis and may have done something similar before.
I would also like to explore graph 1.4 in more detail to see if you can get under the skin of the STEEM "inflation".
data posts take a long time to prepare, well done on all of this work. Next time you should consider posting via utopian for analysis.
Im still off for another few days, the kids are not back to school till the 7th so I wont be able to do anything till then, ping me when I get back and if you need a hand that is no problem
Thanks @Paulag - yes you are right - for some reason I thought it might not have fit the criteria for Utopian - but I should have checked. As you know this did take me a long time! Enjoy the time with the kids I'll be in touch next week.... Cheers