By the way, if you are paying an excessive amount to rent Steem on MinnowBooster, you can set the rate of Steem Power for Steem in the command. For example instead of sending 1 Steem with the command '4' which gives you an effective APR of 42%, over 4 weeks you could use the command '4 200', which would give you half the effective APR. Assuming @thecryptodrive doesn't remove the feature. The 200 is '200 Steem Power per Steem', the default is 100.
There are loads of whales willing to delegate so you would likely get twice the power for the same cost, and you don't have to worry as much about making the money back via self voting.
Edit: I've heard this feature was removed. Fixed prices only.
Hi Demo, I really appreciate your reply and insight on this. I think when I originally used minnowbooster I did not have the math quite down.
In my case I bought into steem with .4 BTC when it was around $1.50 or a little higher. I then used like .2 BTC worth of it to rent SP, and converted my other .2 BTC into my own Steempower.
My original math showed I would make a decent sized return of 15% to 20% if I upvoted myself(assuming I was at 100% voting power and did it at least 5 or 6 times every day). The issue I saw is that when the Steem price fell in half, I ended up going negative by 50% to 60%, with the only way of recovering most of my investment would be to upvote myself 10 to 11 times per day. I completely understand how this is a bad thing now though.
The thing I was unaware of was that there is a reward pool. I did know Steem miners or something was happening in the background to distribute the Steem/SBD(though I am unclear on where SBD comes from, maybe the creators of steemit). I was not versed on what a rewards pool was until I asked about why someone may be downvoting me. I feel like there is a lot more information that needs to be put out there to educate incoming Steemians. Had I understood this concept better I would not have been upvoting my own comments.
Now that I see the negative impact, because if anyone just continually upvotes themselves they can post garbage spam comments and make money. Which eventually will turn Steemit into a spammy crappy place(I don't want that, I ran away from reddit due to that and bots/vote manipulation) because people can see others making money from spam. I feel like I have a lot better understanding now of why it is important to not upvote yourself at least on comments(but don't spam blog posts either), AND why it is important not to upvote spam people post.
Any thoughts you would be willing to add on the @randowhale and other upvoting things? Now that I have thought about all of the above, I am starting to think the randowhale thing might be bad too. I see a lot of people using it to vote on spam or anything you tell it to really(which removes curating and makes it into botting). Not sure how I feel about it now. Hmm.
Well at any rate, thank you!!
I'm not a huge fan of vote selling. However it's impossible to prevent, so the best we can do is damage mitigation. If someone buys votes for quality posts (and usually they will), that's fine. If they buy votes to upvote crap, then I won't have any compunction about downvoting it.
What is crap?
Thanks for the info
Just wanted to say, thank you again for explaining this all to me. 10 months later and I have become a lot better of a Steemian :)
Do you know of a post that lists the "rent" whales?
I've been thinking about this for a while, but as I am already at dolphin level, I didn't think I was eligible for programs like MinnowBooster
thanks!
Check out @minnowbooster posts, they have a website too at
https://www.minnowbooster.net/
https://steemit.com/minnowbooster/@minnowbooster/minnowbooster-update-log-6
checking it out
thanks for heads up!