All this to say that you're right. It's an interesting number, but it doesn't tell you the whole story.
There are lots of interesting numbers on Hive, and I wish I had the skills to play with more of them :)
I expect it to go up as I start converting my HP into HBD Savings and my earned HIVE increases with time.
Are you already converting, or will you wait for price increase on Hive?
I’ve been averaging out of HP into HBD savings with 100 HIVE power downs. I’ll stop when my HBD value equals my HP value. Then I’ll rebalance as I earn, which shouldn’t be too often as rewards are paid equally in both. The equal weight HIVE/HBD is a simple heuristic. If someday HIVE drops below my savings, I’ll have to switch rewards to 100% HP or buy more HIVE out of pocket, depending on the severity. I only want HBD savings to go up, never down.
This is a good strategy too, but remember that the APR on HBD is dictated by the witnesses and can change if it gets too imbalanced.
Yes, I recall at least once when Hive stopped paying HBD rewards, probably when the price was around $0.12 or so. I vaguely remember a blog post discussing how interest rates aren't affected by the haircut rule (currently coded at 30%), only rewards issuance. But if HIVE is dumping again, I'd have to buy more.
There is certainly the risk of the witnesses lowering the interest rate. We don't know how savers would react as prior to having any interest we had none. Going down from 20% to 15% was disappointing, but it at least keeps up with the unofficial speculated inflation rate of about 7%. Would poor interest/no interest cause people convert HBD to HIVE? 🤷 We can only guess.
For me, even if it paid 0% interest, HBD Savings would serve me as a simple heuristic for locking in gains. If HIVE underperforms my HBD Savings, I'll buy more. If HIVE outperforms, I'll scrape off the excess into HBD Savings to maintain the 50/50 ratio.
I still have a ways to go to balance my HIVE/HBD for any useful conclusions.
It's a modified version of https://ecency.com/hive-167922/@travelwritemoney/core-number-compounding-with-hive