Is There Still an Uneven Distribution of STEEM Part 2?

in #utopian-io7 years ago

I recently did an analysis and post on Producer rewards where I asked the question ‘Is There Still Uneven Distribution of STEEM Vests?’

One question that came back to me was ‘what is the overall distribution of Steem?’ and the aim of this analysis is to address this question.

The shortcoming in the mentioned post was that it only looked at STEEM Vests distributed to Witnesses. When a block is witnessed a portion of that STEEM is paid as producer rewards and another portion goes to the rewards pool.

You can read the original post here
https://utopian.io/utopian-io/@paulag/is-there-still-uneven-distribution-of-steem-vests

The portion that goes to the rewards pool is then distributed by way of up votes on posts and comments. The Gross Post payout value is shown in SBD and this is further split between Author and Curator rewards.

Analysis

I connected to the steemsql database held and managed by @acrange and I pulled data for the month of November. For more details on the queries used, please see the bottom of this post.
Below is the Gross Post Payouts Shown in SBD for the month of November 2016. This is for Posts only and does not include Comments. Gross post payout includes both the author and curator rewards.

3.png

As we can see the distribution of payouts by payout values is widely spread between up to a value of $100. Sorting the same data by Author, below we can see the top post earners for the month of November. The top author for gross post payout in November earned 0.75% of the SBD paid out in posts. In fact all of the authors lists below (23 of them) combined makes up 8.8% of post payout value.
In November there were 41.85K Authors. 23 makes up .05% of this.

4.png

Below is the Gross total payout on Comments for the month of November. This only includes comments left on posts.

5.png

Below shows the top authors when it comes to comment gross payout value.

6.png

In total, between posts and comments 1,191,723 value in SBD was distributed for posts and comments made in November to both authors and curators.

Now lets have a look at the producer rewards

7.png

For the month of November 196.39K SP was distributed to witnesses
We can see the top earners in the table below and a more details on this analysis can be found in the first part of this post.

The price of STEEM in November ranged from $1.28 to $0.792 with a median of 1.035. The price of SBD was between $3.02 and $.88 with a median of 1.95

Using the median price for the month of November the SBD to Steem ration is 1.95:1.035. Each SBD can be valued at 1.88 STEEM.

We can now restate the SBD value of Posts and comment to be 2,240,439 SP. The total SP distributed in November was 2,436,829.

The pie chart below shows how this was distributed between posts, comments and witnesses.

9.png

I was asked a specific question by @fitzgibbon. Are the Rich getting richer and the poor poorer?

I need to be very careful in how I answer this question. Many of the names that you see on the top lists are whales, so yes, the rich are getting richer. But if they are not gaining, then why would they stay?

And the poor are not getting poorer. They are not losing money, in fact with the current price of SBD and STEEM, the poorer are gaining. I would also like to point out that I am only 6 months on Steemit and gaining by the day. I came with nothing, I have yet to make a financial investment.

The vast majority of SP distributed went to posts. The vast majority of SP distributed went to posts. There were 41.85K unique authors in the month of November and they all shared in a payout of 1,111,256.

I have therefore sorted the Authors by Gross payput value in the month of November and added the total SP owned (control controlled) by that account and I have added in based on the SP, the account ranking. We can see from this table that the top 75 accounts in November are all within the top 4000 accounts on Steemit.

10.png

Lets put this in a little more perspective

@davidpakman only joined Steemit in September and is ranked 3669 in the above table. His current steemit balance is $2498, with SP of 1386. He has made it to the top 40 accounts based on gross post payout in November.

Now let’s compare this to my account. I did not make it to the top 75 Authors in terms of gross post payout. I would be ranked account 2524 based on the SP I own (2431 SP). I am on Steemit since June 17, only 3 months more than David. There are many people in the top 75 that are ranked lower than me in terms of their SP but make it to the list.

This proves that you don’t have to be rich to be in the top 4000 accounts on Steemit. It also proves that there is a reasonable spread of rewards between accounts Steemit. However you are unlikely to get to the top list unless you have about 1200 SP.

Queries used

SELECT
*
 FROM 
Comments (NOLOCK)
 where created >= CONVERT(datetime,'11/01/2017') 
 and created< CONVERT(datetime,'12/01/2017')
and depth = 0

and

  SELECT
 *
 FROM 
 accounts (NOLOCK)

and

 Select 
 *
 From VOProducerRewards (NOLOCK)
 where timestamp >= CONVERT(datetime,'11/01/2017') 
and timestamp< CONVERT(datetime,'12/01/2017')

After connecting to the data source I then use M in Power BI query editor to further transform the data and I used DAX to carry out calculations and further modeling.

Is there still uneven distribution of STEEM?

Now that you have seen the data, what do you think?

I am part of a Steemit Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BIsteemit. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit data, please do contact me or any of the #bisteemit team and we will do our best to help you... *

You can find #bisteemit on discord https://discordapp.com/invite/JN7Yv7j



Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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Interesting way to view this. I was going to try and compile a list of the top 1000 accounts, known relationships, and current earnings but it would have been too much speculation.

Yes, the rich get richer, but the question I ask myself is... Is Steem adding to my life? If the answer is yes. Might as well earn some Steem.

people love speculation. i would say go for it, I would love to read that post

Is steemit adding to my life, well same as you, yes so I might as well earn some

Thank you for the very detailed information
Here is a resteem
The poor are getting richer a post that pays the 50% in sbd and if that sbd is 1.88 it means you can buy 10 Steem worth $18-$20

This data really provides much insight, that's exactly what I was looking for! Everyone is getting richer, but the rich not disproportially more than the poor. To me it seems that slowly but surely the Steem distribution is getting more spreaded as time passes by. I think this is great news!

I am glad to be the bearer of good news :-)

This post has received gratitude of 1.00 % from @jout

You got a 0.33% upvote from @postpromoter courtesy of @jout!

Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.
"sad but true"
You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]

Hey, im curious more than 'are the rich getting richer';

** Is the distribution getting more or less distributed to the top? Is steem proportionally getting more or less centralized as a network of wealth?**

The rich should get richer if they are helping to build the platform, but I have very little intrest in contributing to a system whose physics trend towards centralization.

I think that everyone who is posting and curating is likely to be getting comparatively richer in proportion to their Steem Power held. Only 1 in 4 Steem in circulation is used to vote, which means that there are large accounts (like the steemit account) plus all the money on Bittrex and Poloniex, that are getting relatively poorer. If you can call having 57m Steem or obtaining huge trading profits poor!

Great point out there. Active users of the platform benefit from liquid Steem held by traders and passive investors.
I always like to point out that Steem has an inflation rate of 10%. (actually less and falling, but it's good to illustrate the point.) If a minnow has 10 Steem and ends the year with 11 Steem, then they are right in line with expected earnings. Anything more than a 10% gain per year (in Steem, not USD valuation) is over performing the platform, and most active Steemians are absolutely crushing a 10% return on their SP.

Then checkout Yoyow:

every user holding the token of a system has the right to vote, with the holding YOYO tokens as thevoting weight.

But here it says about preventing influential accounts from exerting decisive impacts on content voting weight.

RATING_FACTOR = 2, i.e., the voting weight will be doubled by consuming 10x coin days. On this basis, voting weight remains positively correlated with the consumed coin days, which prevents influential accounts from exerting decisive impacts on content voting weight.

@paulag - this type of analysis really helps us to keep track of the progress over time of the distribution of steem and how it might be one of the key factors relating to the overall 'health' of the community and its economy (I think there is a post in this...).

Great post @paulag. I'll be working this weekend on setting up my PowerBI. Thanks for including the queries.

the sql queries are only part of it, there is a lot of dax too. Have you got dax skills?

Yes, manage a data warehouse (on an MS Stack) IRL. Just digging into the data on the blockchain side and setting up my tools.

Such an informative post... following your writing always gives us different insights about steemit!

Don't you love it when people start replies with...

What would be interesting to see would be the order of the post-payout table if self-votes, and bot sends were removed.

I guess then we'd see the 'popular' authors more clearly?

And wow, check out those top 20 witness payouts each month!

@aggroed has been posting like a madman and collected 8k there too, nice!

I also started using bid bots a ton. Whatever values I have are going to be pretty inflated by buying votes as a promotional/marketing expense.

Yes I saw the partnership with @yabatmatt and @postpromoter - I've used postpromoter twice thus far to good effect :)

The main winner is getting into the top 20 witnesses and i cant see any on that list more deserved than you and @lukestokes.

Well done!