As @steempower mentioned and I sneakily replied to above, going from BTC to SBD (the opposite direction) proportionately results in more SBD than one would expect.
But that was not the topic of this post, my guess is that most regular steemit users are going from SBD to BTC, and having recommended blocktrades a couple of days ago, coupled with knowing that this audience is not very well versed in finance and crypto in general, I had to leave the warning here, because the conversion is not working as they would expect.
I never implied there was anything dishonest about it.
Also, would you happen to know who @arsahk, @anastacia and @analisa are ? :) ..
All start with 'a', all have zero posts, all with wallets worth $500k+, all downvoted this post within minutes of each other, and then you come and reply to it. Hmm.
I didn't mean to leave you in the dark there, ofc they are accounts I control, got during early days of mining. I didn't hit you with the "big hammer", just a few of my smaller ones. As you can probably guess, I could have easily voted into total oblivion. I downvoted for the omissions of key information from the article, that make it sound like there was something dishonest about our pricing (despite your assertion otherwise, I think this was a clear takeaway), when the truth is we're just pulling prices from the internal market, and the inaccurate report on our spread. If you're going to write an "expose", I think it makes sense to at least get and report the counterpoint view on the subject you're attacking. These kind of incomplete reports can be quite damaging to a business.
If you read it again without bias, you will hopefully see there is no assertion or accusation, implicit or otherwise, of dishonesty on your part.
If there was, I would have finished by withdrawing my recommendation for your service in this post, which I did not.
Surely you agree that if 1 SBD is supposed to be pegged to right about 1 USD, then anything else than BTC/USD being equivalent or very nearly equivalent to BTC/SBD is expected behavior.
I understand that in practice it does not work like that, and again, go and re-read the article and you will see no accusation of dishonesty, I understand how blocktrades.us calculates the exchange rate (to a working extent, anyway).
And again I remind you, that if you look elsewhere in the comments for @steempower and my reply to him, I was well aware that it was likewise possible to profit from the reverse operation (at least if you believe the peg will go back to parity at some point).
So of course I took advantage of that (with other accounts). The reason I did not write an article on that was that I did not expect the situation to last for long.
To sum it up, days ago I recommended people to change SBD to BTC using blocktrades, the rate was good then, and it seems to me that a good assumption is that most of the community here is not very well versed in finance and crypto, and they might just blindly go and convert SBD to BTC, receiving in BTC about 30% less than what they would otherwise expect.
You know me from Bitshares for some time now and you know I have been a user of your service for a long time, frankly there is no reason to assume I was accusing you or your company of bad conduct.
Interesting gossip: .
heh, it's not like I've ever tried to hide I own these accounts: https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@blocktrades/limited-time-sale-high-steem-power-accounts-for-serious-investors-only
&&-karnal--blocktrades--karnal-bewa-of-converting-steemusd-to-btc-right-now-20160728t090825088z
WTF is that?
@blocktrades , you risk damage to your reputation and it's not because of your pricing policy (you are free to offer whatever prices you want) but due to the aggressive style of your response. Tone down a little bit - @karnal 's post surely did not deserve a reaction like this.
To answer your question: the "big hammer" is the blocktrades account, it has more weight than the downvote accounts I used.
I downvoted the article because it had false information about Blocktrades (specifically a claim of a 30% spread that didn't exist) and the use of the dog meme which to me communicated "you are trying to fool me, but I can see through your trick" (implying some form of deception). Maybe you see some other meaning to the meme, but maybe that's the danger of using memes to communicate meaning. I'm interested in hearing your interpretation, if you want to suggest another one.
Perhaps most importantly, as I indicated previously, I think it's important when writing an expose-type article like this to contact the subject and report their viewpoint. You could argue that the subject can post comments afterwards, but that doesn't help the viewers who never return to the article and never see the rebuttal.