Would certainly help. Although with most patreon's out there accepting donations in the range from 1$ to 1000$ depending on the supporter's interest, then I don't see why STEEM could not be used. Sure, your support may vary, but then people can always readjust their amounts. Also, if we have a good fiat gateway, then a backer could simply support the user with X amount of USD worth of STEEM per month that gets bought and transferred.
But yeah, a working SBD would be ideal. I think having a system like Patreon to drive more demand and volume to SBD, and also raise the STEEM price back up, would be one of the best ways to fix SBDs and thus enable it to work better.
High volatility means ridiculous cognitive load (who the hell wants to adjust their subscription amounts every month, and for creators it means adjusting requested sponsorship levels for status or benefits) and also less willingness to hold onto the coin for non-investors.
The whole crypto ecosystem is moving rapidly toward stablecoins for everything other than explicit investment/speculation. Agree with parent comment.
Also agree that improving the demand/economics of STEEM is an essential component of fixing SBD, though not the only one (also needs an upper bound peg to stop pumps).
Completely agree with all of this. My point was not to dismiss the usefulness of a stable-coin or a functional SBD, but rather the insistence on it or assuming that it is required for this to even work. This would imo result in a chicken or the egg problem, as I believe we need solutions like this to have a functional economy and thus get the SBD back to its peg.
Also, if Steem is to become an attractive and functional platform economy, then at some point it can't be all about the fiat values of the tokens, but people seeing value in the token itself and wanting to use it for its own sake. To get there, we need meaningful ways for people to spend SBDs. Short term, most will for sure get sold to fiat by the creators who want to monetize it. But then over time, adding options like paying for web hosting with SBD (as we currently enable ourselves), having things like steemfests where people buy tickets with SBDs, merch items, etc. Then slowly but surely people will not look to transfer their earned SBD for fiat, but for goods and services, and we'll be on track to sustainably growing this place.
Yeah I agree the stablecoin isn't required to work, but it would be a huge boost, and I also agree that the overall platform needs a lot of chicken-and-egg work.
You're also right that creators would probably sell the SBD for fiat, but still not necessarily right away, especially if SBD were paying some competitive level of interest (even 1/2-1% is probably attractive). People looking to earn rather than speculate are much more likely to hold SBD than STEEM if they don't necessarily need the funds right away, and many don't.
Finally, creators selling SBD could be overall offset by subscribers buying SBD. The key is to have willingness to hold for more than a millisecond. That confidence translate to value entrusted to the system.
But yeah, it all depends on building confidence in the platform as a whole.
What do you think about implementing the possibility to power up SBD as well as Steem ?
Meaning that the 'powered up' SBD should not be taken into account for the haircut calculating.
Instead it should be taken into account for the calculating of vesting_shares.
Interesting idea, but I fear it would not be a high priority for blockchain development for quite some time. We can keep it in mind though, and revisit after more pressing issues are addressed.