I had a realization the other day about what exactly haejin is doing on Steem. I think most people understand that he is milking Steem for all it is worth, but I didn't understand exactly how he was doing it until now.
Haejin is gaming the upvote system.
If you have been on Steemit much you may have realized that you only get 10 full upvotes a day. Each time you use one it slightly decreases the power of your vote. So to maximize your vote you should vote at full exactly every 2.4 hours. Ok, so if you want to use that vote on yourself, that means you need to post 10 times everyday spaced by about 2.4 hours. Now if you go to haejin's page you will see that indeed there are exactly 10 posts everyday going back many months. Many of these have little content, but that doesn't matter if your goal is to game Steem. They aren't always spaced by 2.4 hours, but they aren't bunched up either.
So, how much is he squeezing out of Steem? This is where things get dicey. He needs to have a huge stake in Steem in order to reap rewards from it. He needed to invest a lot of money into Steem to get money out. Many people come on Steem with no investment at all and could be said to be mooching off the system even more because they have an effectively infinite return on invested capital. However, using his method what would someone see as a return?
Using @penguinpablo 's upvote calculator, 10,000 steem power gives you a $0.85 upvote. Today's price of steem is $1.42 which means you need $14,200 powered up to reap that reward. This places every self vote as a 0.006% return on your investment. Doesn't seem like much, but what if we apply the voting scheme mentioned above? Since you can get rewards exactly one week after earning them, we will assume the reward compounds daily.
Ok, so ten posts a day means .06% daily return. Seven days a week means 0.42% weekly return. At a month, the compounding starts to have an effect giving you 1.82% monthly return. But nobody measures return in weeks or months. What's the yearly return?
24.47%
That's right. By making ten posts a day and upvoting yourself everytime, this is the return on invested capital. Now, there is also inflation which sits around 10% currently, but the amount of steem power increases by the above amount without taking into account the changing price.
This isn't actually a terrible thing. This is the incentive to post content, but the quality of the content is important and haejin's content is of a debatable quality which is why each of his posts is a small flag war.
I hope this was informative. Until next time,
Curtis
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