the peg could obviously be easily attained regardless of what crypto traders do - just a matter of enforcing the peg through hardfork in internal market, as has been proposed by quite a few witnesses. As far as saying SBD isn't the problem - I thought it was self evident how the broken peg is part of the problem, but I will provide example. @kevinwong's original post is suggesting to change curation rewards to 50% / 50%, away from current 75% / 25%. But is the current system actually 75% / 25%? No it is not, because of the broken peg.
Current system
(we will use $12 post payout and assume 25% curator share for simplicity of numbers):
$12 payout post :
CURATION REWARDS:
- 25% curator rewards in form of USD value of STEEM: $12 * .25 = $3 US worth of STEEM (at current time STEEM = $3.50 US) = .857 STEEM
AUTHOR REWARDS
75% author rewards, 1/2 in USD value of STEEM and 1/2 in SBD assuming 1 SBD = $1 US dollars (to be clear, this is currently the assumption the reward payout makes - clearly, 1 SBD does NOT actually equal $1 USD, but that is what the reward formula assumes!)
- 37.5% in STEEM in form of USD value of STEEM: $12 * .375 = $4.50 US worth of STEEM = 1.286 STEEM
- 37.5% in SBD assuming 1 SBD equals $1 USD = 4.5 SBD (current price of SBD is $2.91 US) = $13.095 USD value
- total USD value of author rewards = $4.50 worth of STEEM + $13.095 worth of SBD = $17.595 USD value
So under current system, the actual split for a $12 payout post is: Curation rewards: .857 STEEM, Author Rewards: 1.286 STEEM & 4.5 SBD
Actual split by USD value: 14.5% curation / 85.5% author
Hypothetical SBD actually pegged one to one with $ USD
If SBD was pegged to $1 US, the only thing that would change is instead of being paid out 4.5 SBD, the author would receive $4.50 USD value of SBD (1.546 SBD), so curator reward stays at .857 STEEM, but author rewards: 1.286 STEEM & 1.546 SBD.
Note the difference in SBD that the author receives! The broken peg means for a $12 post, the author currently receives an extra 2.954 SBD! That is, precisely, the margin within which vote selling operates. The broken peg is artificially inflating SBD by minting more SBD than intended (again, the clear intent of STEEM/SBD and the way the reward formula works is to assume a $1 peg for SBD), and speculative traders/ pumps are keeping price of SBD up despite that inflation, and this provides the margin that allows the author to still make a small profit when buying votes. If the peg was working as intended there would be no profit to be made for the author from buying a vote, and hence, very little demand for vote selling. Buying a vote would be a net loss every time for the vote buyer, instead of about a wash or even the possibility to make money for the vote buyer as it is currently. To me, this is very clear. Fixing the peg would immediately eliminate a huge chunk of the profitability of vote selling. It would also increase the relative % of curation reward compared with author reward.