RE: Thought Experiment: What would be the effect of crazy-high SBD interest?
I'm not sure, but if I remember right, it only pays interest on SBDs in "Savings"
I believe one of the Hive hardforks made it so only "savings" HBDs would earn interest, so presumably the behavior before that was that interest would apply to both savings and liquid HBDs, so I assume that's how Steem worked and still works.
Perhaps, but I'm not sure if it would look more sketchy than our Trending page already does.
I think things which are more clearly "finance related" are more likely to be considered newsworthy by the greater cryptosphere. People might not spontaneously investigate what the Trending page looks like, but information about changes in financial policy could be the stuff of news or rumors.
although "cheap liquid Steem" here is not consistent with "why not just maneuver the price of Steem to guarantee SBD printing".
Right, for this point I was assuming for the sake of argument that your hypothetical was correct (which would imply that my hypothetical from the previous point was wrong).
Ah, I guess you're right. I thought I remembered seeing in Steemit's wallet that interest was paid on SBDs in savings, but not on the first SBD line, but I don't see that now, so could be wrong. It looks like they've removed all references to SBD interest now.
I do see it like that in upvu's wallet:
but that could be because they cloned the code from ecency, which had migrated to Hive.
So yeah, all bets are off... Thank you for catching that. I'll have to rethink things with that change in mind.