After watching the Free Talk Live show discussing Steem, I noticed one question kept coming up over and over again: how does the Steem Dollar stay pegged to the dollar? In this video, I answer that question.
Would you like me to cover another topic? Make requests below! :)
Don't you have an error when state the price will the price on the day when the contract executes at the end of the week? The entire point of the 1 week delay is to force an average weighted price over the entire week, since the attacker can't likely sustain the attack for all 7 days.
Yes, his statement was a simplification. The price is not the price on that day, but the mean price over the period of a week as declared by the witnesses.
If there are rapid price fluctuations, it may or may not be in your best interest to convert your Steem Dollars (you might get an overly good deal or overly bad deal or even exchange). The point is that you can't predict what you'll get at the time you execute the contract. Over time, most likely you'll average an even exchange rate between SD and STEEM.
I wonder though if the constant high inflation of STEEM means that over time your exchange rate between SD and STEEM will actually be slightly biased towards discounted SD.
Slightly yes but not as much as the actual discount. This could be corrected for by a slight offsetting adjustment in the feed price, if that made the difference (but it doesn't).
Yeah, I guess it's pretty obvious that inflation wouldn't account for a 15% discount. So why aren't large players betting on the peg and buying up all the SBD at discount?
Suggestions? How about next time write it down, so I can spend one minute skimming it (which I would do) instead of 5 minutes watching it (which I didn't do).
Well the super short version is: a SD is a smart contract representing $1 of debt from the Steem blockchain at large to the holder of the SD. That contract can be sold, in which case it's worth about a dollar, since it represents $1 worth of steem at some point in the future; or it can be executed. If it's executed, the blockchain locks it up for a week, then prints $1 worth of new steem at the end of the week and gives it to the SD holder, and destroys the SD.
The one-week delay is necessary to prevent market manipulation: a whale could dump funds on the markets skewing the price, then execute the contract at a biased price. To prevent this, the week-long delay is used to raise the bar; the attacker would have to maintain a manipulated price for half of that week (or so, I don't know the exact timeframe) to affect the price his contract executes at.
Did you mention the interest rate?
@bacchist Wait, what? SBD pays interest directly? This is something I didn't know. Can you please link the source? I don't recall that being in the whitepaper anywhere and if I missed it then I have been making some really bad financial decisions (been converting SBD to bitUSD taking a slight loss).
I will upvote that information!
@bacchist Wow I just re-read the paper and you're right. It's right there! Upvoted you, also just became your 100th follower. Thanks for that bit of information!
It is in the whitepaper. Now itis monthly 1% and the interest paid in every 30 days. As I know the witnesses vote for the interest rate.
It is certainly in the white paper. It is also in the white paper that the interest rate should be raised if the market is valuing SBD below $1 USD and the debt-to-ownership ratio isn't too high. And interest payments should be discontinued if the market is valuing SBD above $1 USD.
Unfortunately (in my opinion) the interest rate has not been responding to the market undervaluing SBD... I don't think it has ever changed from the 10% apr that it has always been. It's an important part of the peg that should be functioning and should also be promoted more than it currently is, so that it has an actual effect on the market rather than being some obscure thing as it currently is.
Yes, I am curious about the interest rate as well as the price feeds and how that all operatess.
No I didn't. Good point. :) Steem pays interest on SBD to encourage people to hold it rather than convert it to STEEM immediately. This is because the chain wants to avoid inflating STEEM for as long as possible, as conversions are paid out of inflation.
Thanks. So much of the web has switched to video these days. I prefer plain text. Or, if you must do video, for those who won't read, at least a full transcript.
What's a whale btw?
Is "Steem" mined like Bitcoin, with a mathematical limit to how much Steem can be mined?
A whale = an account holder who has a very large amount of some asset, enough so that selling it all at once could significantly impact market prices.
There is a mining process analogous to how Bitcoin is mined, but unlike Bitcoin there is no upper limit to the amount of Steem that can be created. You should read the whitepaper; it covers this topic in great detail.
How does the blockchain now what $1 of steem is?
100% agree... it'd be great if you could add the short-version to the post, and tease more detail in the video.
Holy mother of beards sir!
Grew slightly since Acapulco ^^
Ok I'll watch your vid and upvote now. I just had to comment on el beardo. Not sure my brain could've paid attention if I didn't get that out of the way.
$teem work$
Lol, yeah just a bit. ;) Thanks!
#feelthebern is so outdated let's go with #feelthebeard now
One correction, and i understand that there has been some confusion on this.
The steem that you get when you convert an SBD is not created when you convert it. Its created at the same time the SBD is created. That steem is added to the vesting fund (where SP balances are stored) . If it takes more steem to redeem your dollar (ie if the price of steem goes down) then the loss is socialized to all SP holders. The same with the gain if it takes less steem to redeem the SBD than was created when the SBD was.
SO if the price of steem went low enough, redeeming SBD could actually make your SP balances run backwards by depleting the vesting fund.
Interesting. I did not know this.
you have very nice color eyes
That talk was an embarrassment, particularly after Jeff left. It was clear no one there knew anything about Steem aside from FUD spread across the internet. The most hilarious part was when the host kept talking about a cap of 47,000 users from the "whitepaper". No idea what he was looking at, but it sure as hell wasn't the Whitepaper.
That said, a valid question is why the 1 Steem Dollar is US$ 0.85 at the exchanges.
Haha, yeah, though even when Jeff was there, there was a lot of uncertainty and confusion. Jeff is super pumped about Steem, and I'm glad that he's doing so much to promote it, but he has much to learn yet (which he's vocally aware of, so good on him).
Off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why 1 SD would trade at substantially less than $1:
I feel it has something to do with discrepancies between Internal Market and exchanges. Currently, the Internal Market is trading at SBD 1.97 for 1 Steem. If SBD 1 = USD 1, the exchanges would be trading at US$ 1.97 too. But the exchanges are at US$1.70. By undervaluing the SBD at $0.90, it keeps the USD value of the Internal Market much closer to the exchanges. However, in this case, should the Steem price not rise to meet the Internal Market? And not a fall in the SBD?
But anyhow, that's how it has worked out so far. I hope this stabilizes in the future, and the Steem founders are taking measures to do so.
The internal market is almost entirely irrelevant at this point. Hardly anyone uses it and I question whether it is even needed. (We have it and it works, so I wouldn't suggest getting rid of it, but if we did, the essential functions of Steem would not be affected at all.)
I agree with @modprobe's answer.
The internal market is using a 7-day rolling average price for Steem.
The internal market is based on supply and demand, just as Poloniex or Bittrex. The price will generally track to the price found on external markets.
Also the fact that it's locked up for 7 days. I've posted arguing that it should be changed from a 7 day waiting period to a 3 day waiting period, due to the risk that is involved. Changes in the market can cause the user to lose money... If the price of STEEM is below the weekly average when the order is executed by a greater proportion than the market is undervaluing SBD, they will have lost value. It's hard to forecast what the market is going to do a week out.
I believe it's trading at a discount because of the 1-week delay in price feeds. If STEEM were increasing in value, SBD would be trading at a premium. I think... I haven't completely worked out all the details yet.
Anyway, the conversion price lags the real-world price by about half a week, which means I'm not confident that I'd make money by buying SBD at a discount and then converting it to STEEM.
@biophil Excellent insight and you are 100% spot on. People are pricing in the risk of a slide in the dollar value of steem. They want out and they want out now. Back when the price of steem was rising, you couldn't buy SBD for less than a 30% premium. I have a post from back when that was a fact, explaining to people that they should sell SBD on polo to drive the price back down to normal.
Right now, the very best thing you can do financially is either to hold SBD (which I've just found gains 10% interest), or convert it to steem thereby giving you about a 20% gain in dollar terms and also destroys the excess steem in the system.
Yeah, I'm running a SBD-to-STEEM conversion experiment right now where I'm converting a set amount of SBD per day and then re-purchasing SBD when the conversion goes through. My first attempt that I completed today netted me a little over 2% (I started with 200 SBD, ended up with just over 204). That is very very far from the 15% that all of the face values are suggesting, and I don't know where you came up with 20% - that's simply not available today. :)
I think it is a combination of two things:
If you think people are pricing it wrong, buy up Steem dollars and convert them to Steem. But the fact that this price discrepancy remains shows that nobody is willing to bet a ton of money that the price is wrong.
I'd do this, but the 1-week delayed feed puts a lot of uncertainty into that conversion because the conversion price lags the real-world price by about half a week.
Exactly. And it's possible that most of the "discount" is the rational pricing of that risk.
Yep
Thanks @modprobe. I get asked about this one a lot too and I never felt I understood it well enough to make a video. Now I don't have to! :)
Short and on-point. Killed it!
Thanks so much for the great explanation! Having experts like you explaining this is essential to educating Steemers. I just love what I'm learning here and appreciate your efforts. What a great community! Followed!
Thanks for the explanation @modprobe, I think you should explain to Tone Vays one thing or two on how Steemit needs a blockchain to run on. // thanks again
@modprobe Awesome video! In addition to the quality of the content, I liked your look (eye contact with the camera and presence overall). I also appreciated your tonality and voice control. It's an extremely well done video.
Get a steem shirt T-Shirt though! :D
Haha, thanks. And that's a good idea; I'll do that.
So what are the pros and cons of the following?
1.)Converting Steem Dollars to Steem over 1 week
2.)Selling Steem Dollars on an exchange, converting to Steem and sending that back to steemit in your wallet.
Does it depend on the amount of steem dollars being converted?
Eg. If you received $1,000 as an author reward would it be better to do option 1 or 2?
The exchanges have transaction fees, but would that transaction fee be negated by your increased steem power that you now have a week earlier than you would if you had waited?
I'm really curious to know, and you are right. Far to many people are confused about the dollar amounts and what you actually receive and how steem dollars are pegged to a dollar etc.
While I love the whitepaper, maybe someone could write a guide pdf to go alongside it in layman's terms by asking people what their biggest confusion is and answering them in paper for or faq.
The guide should have the approval of @ned and @dan, kind of like a "steemit for dummies," because there are many that are familiar with posting on social media, but cryptocurrency is way beyond them with the current whitepaper, and finding articles in the google search is not the easiest thing to do yet.
Note that option 2 can be performed entirely on-chain, simply by using the internal exchange between STEEM and SD.
Option 1 involves a certain degree of risk; you can't know exactly what price you'll get your exchange at, all you know is that it should be relatively up-to-date at the time the conversion takes place. Option 2 has no risk, but subjects you to the vagaries of asset markets. You can pick your own price, but will anyone be willing to trade at that price? You can choose a price you know someone is willing to trade at, but will you have to take a significant cut to make your trade quickly?
As market volume increases, though, the difference between the two options will probably begin to disappear (and no one will likely bother with option 1 at all).
That makes sense. Something I've been wondering for a while and didn't know exactly how it worked. Maybe you could do a post for newbies that shows exactly how a post is paid out. Like if it says $100 for the original blog and a few different comments have dollar values too. That might be helpful to some people. Especially since you have made a bite sized video that anyone can quickly watch and understand.
That is a good topic; unfortunately, I don't understand it that well. Perhaps it would be good for me to dig into the code and see exactly how it works, then elucidate it for others. :)
Currently there isn't a good way to easily find out all the relevant details how Steem works. Everything is scattered around Steem and forums, and whitepaper hasn't been updated for a long time.
So if somebody really wants to learn everything, he needs to check the source code. For a coder that is time consuming and for a non-coder that's not helpful at all.
IMHO this is a quite big problem at the moment.
I agree. If someone compiled it all into a single, easy-to-browse location, it would probably garner many upvotes, especially from whales (who are heavily invested in the system being transparent and trusted).
Hopefully we could finally get a wiki for Steem, that would help a lot: https://steemit.com/steemit-ideas/@samupaha/steem-really-needs-a-wiki
I would love if you have a possible ending for my next story :)
I don't follow... What do you mean?
interesting...
Very helpful, thank you! I still don't fully understand how it all works but this helps me understand the so-called "dollar peg". Cheers!
modprobe
You already participate in competition a #beardsfrombelow? :)
Joke!
Hello!
Now, seriously!
Give please advice is not English-speaking users.
Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian and many other users do not know English and they are very hard to earn here. Because the bulk of the whale is the English-language audience.
(Even more so now there is an outflow of whales. Possible in warmer climes went on vacation).
Sadly, I don't know any other natural languages, so there's not much I can do to help non-English-speaking users. :(
I can't see the video, what reason?
I don't know... :( Can you see it here?
Very Informative.
Thank you very much sir.
That is a rockin beard!
excellent and clear explanation. thank you.
It's indeed a very confusing topic. Thanks for the explanation.
I think I must watch it multiple times to completely grasp it.
Think I'm with you... tough one.
This awesome explanation was brought to you by Duct Tape the miracle product. Thanks @modprobe
Hahaha, yeah, gotta love my ghetto headphones. They're a great set of cans, but the faux-leather on top was breaking apart giving me 'black dandruff', so I duct-taped them to keep my hair clean. :P
Thank you for clarifying this please keep picking a topic and explain it
Feel free to make requests! :)
Thanks for post
Been subscribed to you on Steemit for more than a month and now I'm following you on YouTube :)
Thanks @modprobe..... that's about the best explanation I have seen on the Steem Dollar. You broke it down in the simplest terms. I have always believed in the KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID way of teaching. It was short and too the point. :)
Great, informative video, brother. Now I can more easily explain the peg. I love your work. Keep it up.
Thanks for explaining this, I've been wondering the heck out of that :p
Thanks for you clear explanation in the video.
Good stuff man, keep up the good work, can you talk at all about the possibility of other software using the scratchpad section of each block in the steem blockchain, my interest is specifically towards using that extra space as a games running database, and possibly what coding skills I would need to bone up on to do so?
You can publish arbitrary data to the blockchain in transactions, but if you want to track that data and maintain a database with it, you'll have to write a Graphene plugin (in C++). Making transactions can be done from any language, though C++ and Javascript are probably easiest as there are lots of tools and libraries from the community for making and signing transactions in these.
How is printing more steem to make steem's market cap bigger than the total of the SBDs act as a sustainable way of keeping the debt in check? Printing steem should only work as a short term increase in the market cap. After that newly minted steem hits the market as a sell pressure, the market cap will decrease again, to where it was before, or more. It seems like an underhanded way of tricking people into thinking that there's a bigger market cap than there is.
Also, market cap is a poor way of figuring out how much an asset is worth, especially with very volatile assets. It is not a sum of how much people paid to get their share in the market. It's simply the number of shares times the current price per share. And it is not the sum of how much everybody could get out of the market if they all sold - by the time most of them had sold, the price would be much lower.
And this is compounded by the fact that the blockchain is printing more steem everyday. As well as the fact that the steem created can't enter the market immediately, it happens over the course of two years. Market cap might be an "ok" way of figuring out how much debt a publicly traded company is good for (not really though, investors would look at revenue and capital instead) but it is utterly terrible for figuring out how much a blockchain, especially one with these kinds of rules, is good for.
SBD is not included in the market cap. I'm not sure where you're getting market cap from; I never talked about market cap in my video... The relationship between the SBD supply and the market cap is that if the SBD supply ever exceeds the market cap, the chain is running on a fractional reserve as the entire blockchain is not valuable enough to pay its debt. In practice, insolvency would come much sooner, as the mass execution of SBD contracts and sale of the resultant steem would drop the market cap considerably.
The chain has a lot of rules and formulas in place to regulate how much debt it's creating to try to maintain solvency, but at the end of the day, an SBD holder must decide whether he wants to hold that debt or would rather hold asset.
i understand very little because I'm an idiot
Okay. Until your video, I was... pretending to get it. Your video: I get it.
Basically, we are investing in the future of the site with our content. Under the assumption that Steemit will become more desirable in the future to investors because of our content. And we have the option to cash out at any time, BUT we also have the option to further invest in the community. Classic short term vs long term investment dynamics. I'm street educated, but this makes sense now.
I am cautiously optimistic.
Yes, but it's not immediately clear what drives the value of STEEM unless people start buying it as a pay-what-you-want subscription to Steem content, buying it to increase their own voting power, or transacting in it directly instead of with other currencies. We need a real economy in STEEM if the system is to last.
Couldn't a whale dump the moment before execution? Is the price an average over that week, or is it just the point in time exactly one week in the future?
It isn't an average of the price, it is a median of the price. I'm not sure exactly how long that median covers, though.
You have failed steemit when you shave your beard!
A great video for newbies. Very helpful.
So how is having "Steem Dollars" supposed to result in having actual US Dollars?
I describe this in my video. There are two mechanisms (for now) by which this happens: sell the SD contract directly, or execute it and sell the Steem it represents. Either way, you end up with about a dollar worth of asset which you can sell for federal reserve notes on a crypto-to-fiat exchange.
When a Steem Dollar debt is collected (cashed in for steem on the system) Is that debt repaid through the built in inflation? What i mean does it add to the inflation, or does it come out as a portion of the predetermined inlflation (that creates the curation and author rewards + steem power interest).
It is paid through inflation, yes. The blockchain has some formulas for how much SD it creates to try to keep its debt (and thus, inflation) in check.
#mirra ~ #literature
How we can help each other make it big on steemit:
https://steemit.com/steem/@jrcornel/3z6j7i-tired-of-your-posts-not-being-heard-on-steemit-join-me-and-lets-build-an-empire
Make it relevant to my post, or it gets downvoted.
Got it... How long has it been sitting at .85 to the dollar?
@jcornel Since the hardfork where they killed the liquidity rewards for market makers and the market makers left because of it.
No idea. I haven't been following it.