Why was the SBD supply increasing so fast last year when the prices were high? I was watching the supply go up super fast. I assumed it was the witnesses changing some settings to try and get SBD to go back to 1 by issuing more SBD's.
There were no witness setting changes whatsoever. A couple of witnesses did attempt to do so but all witness settings are subject to a vote (or median function in the case of price inputs) and it takes more than two witnesses to make any difference.
The high rate of supply growth was a function of the high price of STEEM (so large reward pool) coupled with SBD being overvalued. Normally (when SBD is priced about $1), there is a dynamic balance bewteen SBD being printed and SBD being destroyed by conversions. However, when SBD is way overvalued no sane person does conversions so the supply just builds up.
Also there are already stable coins that actually hold a peg out there like TrueUSD, why not just use those?
Those coins have counterparty risk and have 'features' which enable the custodian to freeze your coins. They also require using other blockchains with inferior scalability and the need to pay transaction fees in another coin (so if you want to buy some TUSD, you also have to buy ETH just to pay fees). The former is a different tradeoff (meaning there is room for both) and the latter is just a product with a much worse user experience.
Why not just use a calculator like the bitcoin merchants do?
Also what is your discord name, i didn't find you under smooth.
People want to HOLD some stable value (at least for short to intermediate periods). There is at least 2 billion dollars in stablecoins and it is one of the most rapidly growing segments of the cryptocurrency market both in terms of market cap and new projects working to address it.
Merchant might be another use case but just not having the value of your coins change by 10% +/- per day is enough of a reason to want it. Actually, this relates to merchants too, since most of the Bitcoin merchants immediately convert to fiat (or have their payment processor do so). They can't or don't want to risk losing 10% of their revenue on a Bitcoin dump.
I'm registered as smooth but I don't sign onto discord much.
Do you use skype?
Yeah that all makes sense, what do you propose for the SBD going below $1 like now.
Unfortunately all I can propose is wait it out. That's both a short term and a longer term answer. Short term SBD is in the process of righting itself, like a flooded boat with a bilge pump running.
Longer term, the volatility of the underlying backing assets needs to decline some. SBD (nor BitUSD nor NuBits, nor probably DAI, etc.) can not tolerate an environment where the backing asset routinely drops 95% in value and has single days of 20-30% drops. But when we get to the point that volatility of cryptos is similar to gold or stocks, if perhaps somewhat (not insanely) higher, the core asset will still too volatile for most people and businesses to want to hold it directly as a short term store of value (as opposed to longer term investment or store of value) but systems like SBD (maybe not exactly the current SBD, as it still needs some work, but something not far from it) built on top of those assets will work much better, perhaps never failing at all.