Hmm that's a good point. I'm not 100% sure on all the economics of it but if Splinterlands is "burning" assets I would say this is to their benefit and not the exactly for the wider community. Burning the dec/vouchers just helps them to keep it from getting over diluted if they didn’t burn it. But in the end it is the same value to Splinterlands. They already got your $1 for each 1k DEC. The problem is when the put too much into the economy or take out too much out that causes the price to vary from its intended par value. That can be bad for the community and burning it can be good for the community but at the end of the day Splinterlands still earned the par value of the DEC from you the consumer.
Here is an example.
DEC is trading above $1 so Splinterlands decides to “print” more and sell it to people on the open market. They get the $1 par value they wanted and possibly any excess if they sold over $1. If the DEC value drops below $1 then they stop “printing” DEC. Waiting for people to use it instead of their credits because they get a better value spending/burning DEC that is $0.90 versus spending $1 in credits. Splinterlands burns this DEC to raise its value closer to par. In either scenario it doesn’t matter Splinterlands is making money. That money isn’t going back to you or the community when it is burned at least to my knowledge.
That is not how DEC is created. This is not Web 2! Read the Whitepapers (there are several). Anyone can create DEC by burning SPS. The developers do not pocket anything when DEC is created. They can sell Booster Packs for DEC; but they are not creating DEC to profit from the market.
Oh boy 🙄. What we’re saying is Splinterlands is willfully exchanging assets for free or at a loss. That either means one of two things. The assets you’re getting is completely worthless (SPS, Vouchers, cards, potions - which is true for potions) as they can easily provide them with no cost or this isn’t a sustainable business as they’re giving out more than they’re taking in as they’re giving out assets with value while taking in nothing.
While people have the ability to create DEC I would say that Splinterlands has the ability to print DEC as they did when it was a reward. For example when it is a leaderboard reward or when it was a ranked battle reward. For reference the number of DEC in the open market over the past 120 days has increased 1B. I haven’t reviewed the amount of burned SPS in that time frame but I think the lifetime of SPS burned for dec is ~54M ~1.5B DEC created. About 1.4B DEC has been burned but there is still about 5.5 DEC out there. Sure there is carryover from before but with the amount of DEC created from SPS burn and the amount of DEC burned you would think the supply of DEC remained flat. Yet it increased 1B over 4 months. 🤷
But like I said I’m not 100% sure on the economics or all the ins and outs of Splinterlands. I’m just going with basic logic. If I’m missing something, happy to hear about it.