I have said this elsewhere.
SBD should be pegged, else, why have it. Just give everyone STEEM for their SBD.
Should we do this peg now? I wouldn't. I would wait until this market cycle is over. There is too much up pressure on SBD right now.
And that up pressure will have to be taken into account in any future convertibility factors.
I would suggest a way of converting both directions, but it should be lossy. As in, if you convert one way, then back, you lose 1%.
There's been some discussions about the conversion being lossy, but if we add too much resistance to it, I think people will decide not to use it and choose something else like bitUSD.
I wonder if this market cycle will end or if people will just keep pumping SBD up. From a certain perspective, it's a better token than BTC (lower supply, free to transfer, 3 second confirmation times, hard floor of always being worth at least $1 USD in STEEM, etc).
IMO we can start with a lossy (spread) conversion and if it turns out that everything is working great but the only problem we still have is that he peg has only a bit too much slack (which would still be such as huge improvement from the status quo obviously) then we can tweak it again to tighten/remove the spread. That is a a relatively small change.
Yeah, I do like taking steps to make it safer if and when we do implement something. Paying a small price to do the conversion may be a good way to introduce it. It's still possible some systemic risk exists we haven't yet seen and would only find once we see it in production (unless we develop ways to model this ideas effectively beforehand).
I think considering indeterminacy due to Steem price fluctuations during 3.5 days of convertion no average user would ever pay attention for 1% extra spread.
Average users aren't really the price setters though. That's more a function of what bigger traders do and bigger traders will pay attention to it. I still think a small spread is okay, and can be reduced/removed later if it isn't.
Yes, I fully agree that this option is going to attract big traders, probably even traders from the outside of the current Steem ecosystem.
It's sort of introducing 'futures market' or 'prediction market' for Steem. I wouldn't be surprised to see really big volumes converted back and forth.
So I feel like we could demand some contribution )