Sort:  

Thank you for your feedback.

One thing I'm confused about though.

Default option means you'll get 37.5 SBD (50 % of $75) in your wallet.

So, your payout will be 37.5 SBD, other than the SP. Let's look at SP now.

SP
The other $37.5 will be converted into SP. SP isn't equal in value to SBD so you won't get 37.5 SBD straight away. As per the current price on BlockTrades, 1 SBD = 0.81 SP

We know that the other 50 % (37.5 SBD) will be converted into SP.
Therefore, 37.5 SBD = 37.52 x 0.81 SP = 30.375 SP

This seems to be correct from what I can see.

The current rate is about 1sbd=0.37SP

Now steem to so converts 1/1 doesn't it?

Because if I take 1sbd and sell it on the market it will get me around 3.7 steem, which I can then power up.

So why does the reward calculation take the inverse, and give you the smaller sp, which isn't really worth 50% of the total reward at all?

Calculations are based on SBD's price pegged to $1 but at the moment it is trading over $7 in thr market. For each SBD, we should be getting 3.7 SP as you mentioned. Here's why it is not happening.

  1. Numbe of Steem available in the reward pool daily is fixed and limited. It simply is not possible for Steemit Inc. to reward people with More SP (Steem) due to scarcity.

  2. SBD was designed to stay around $1, which means that $1 worth of Steem was rewarded for every SBD in the payout. However, the price has risen so much but even now, Steemit is rewarding $1 worth of SP for every SBD.

  3. Even if more Steem is given to authors in payouts, there will be a flood of Steem in the market and the heavy inflation will crash Steem's price.

I hope I have answered your question.

Great article and great answer. Because of this, do you think it is better to take the payout at 50-50 so that you get some SBD, then sell the SBD on market, buy STEEM with it (which has been trading for less), then power up the STEEM to get the SP? It seems one might come out much ahead of directly getting SBD valued at $1 when it is trading at about $5 right now. Your thoughts?

And btw, thanks for all your great articles. I'm still reading through them and plan to share a number of them with folks in a crypto beginners group I have. Great stuff and you're very generous with your time as well.