Your assessment makes sense. The high price of SBD is creating astronomical payouts for some authors, SBD encouraging everyone to cash out their author rewards. But I would disagree that it’s draining the system. There is no more drain than what was planned for healthy growth. SBDs are high, but you can only get 50% of your payout in them. All curation is rewarded in SP, so there’s no drain there. I would argue that the high price of SBD has actually enriched the system with a lot more active users engaging more deeply. When SBDs crash, unless your hodling SBD, which I doubt any bloggers are, there’s no real loss. It’s an asset that’s meant to pay the authors so they can keep writing great content, they are just getting paid more now, without any extra extraction happening.
My only worry is the flood of new users attracted by the high SBD, willl leave when it drops. But if that’s the only reason they are here, than let them leave, we’ll rebuild and they will miss out.
If all of that causes Steem to drop in price, great! I’ll be able to buy loads more!
You make a few interesting points here and I agree if people are only here for the large payouts let them leave and we can rebuild.
With respect to the 50:50 payout it's actually highly skewed at the moment. It's more like 10:90 (in value terms because of the FX on SBD). Another comment here has noted that there is a mechanism built in to adjust this which has reduced payouts to it to 75:25 so hopefully that will put downward pressure on the price but I am not seeing it yet.
The only way you I can make full sense of your statement, is if you believe everyone should be powering up their total rewards, rather than cashing out half
There is no value being extracted otherwise. And the payouts aren’t skewed. Every $1 SBD an author receives represents $1 USD in Steem. No extra tokens are being created. It just so happens traders outside of Steem are willing to pay more for SBD. Good for Steem, good for authors, bad for traders. No value lost for Steem. For users trading their SBD for Steem this actually means they are buying more Steem than their post generated and are putting extra demand pressures on the value of Steem. Which is the exact opposite of draining the system.
The payouts are skewed only if you are looking at final dollar amount authors receive, not Steem. The dollar amounts shown are just a front facing mechanism. What matters to the Steem economy is the Steem created and paid out.