It's not quite that simple. It's displayed in USD, but it doesn't take into account the market price of SBD. With 50/50 payout selected, if you earn $10 on a post, you'll get $5 USD worth of Steem Power, and you'll get 5 SBD. If SBD are trading at $1, your 5 SBD are worth $5 USD. But if SBD are trading at $10, your 5 SBD are worth $50 USD.
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Thanks for reply. Why would they payout half in USD and half in SBD? Also that doesn't account for the crazy curation rewards algorithm. 🙄
No USD is paid out. Payouts are half in SBD and half in Steem Power.
Ok from above you said if a post earned $10 the 5 USD would be paid in SP and 5 SBD. Why not 5 SBD worth of SP?
USD is what the creators decided to price things in on the platform. That can be changed at any time with a hard fork. It could be priced in gold, silver, pesos, rubles, yuan, or many other things. There's a Russian form of Steem called Golos which decided to price things in terms of gold.
If you were to read the original whitepaper, you'd see that SBD was created as a smart contract that was always supposed to be worth about $1. Clearly, that's not the case, but if it had worked as planned, there wouldn't be much difference between pricing it in SBD and USD.