I rather think high SBD price caused by speculators benefits the community, especially our contributors. Why don't we leaving it and giving more profits to the community?
I think that happens either way. If demand for SBD is transferred into demand for STEEM then the community profits anyway, both from price appreciation of STEEM and from increased rewards since they are based on the STEEM price, even when paid in SBD. I don't see a benefit in paying 1 SBD worth $2 rather than paying 2 SBD worth $1 each. Both reach much the same equilibrium in terms of SBD supply, yet the latter adds utility to the token in terms of better stability (if people don't want stability they can use STEEM or something else).
Someone (may have been you) pointed out in discussion that the current and potential demand for stable tokens is extremely large (Tether has $40 million market cap despite its obvious and demonstrated centralization risks). Even not being all that functional, SBD is capturing some of it. We can capture a lot more of it if SBD works better, and pull that demand into STEEM value as well.
We need to think about that Steem is primarily social platform and it can be better to take simpler way although not much accurate, unless something harms. I actually haven't heard any complaints about high SBD from the community members.
SBD is working well now, as a value-guaranteed community asset. It guarantees authors that earned rewards won't below specific USD-denominated values. If one wants better pegged cryptocurrency, I would recommend Smartcoins of Bitshares.
IMO @timcliff's proposal is a small change that makes an incremental improvement. It might not be the best possible approach for pegged currency, but in terms of making small improvements, I see it having a lot of merit and not much downside. It is certainly a much less major change in terms of both development effort and the nature of the platform than would be something like smartcoins.
For me, it is not a small change. It is fundamental economic model change that opens SBD creation ability to individuals (maybe call it privatizing SBD printing)
What do you think of a more modest change which would be to allow authors to choose between 100% SBD, 50/50 and 100% SP (adding the first option to the latter two which already exist)? This would provide some additional ability for the SBD supply to respond to demand, but not unlimited, which as you say is a bigger change.
I guess we'll touch the 10% "debt limit" before it could push dawn the price.
I'm sure that is possible but considering we are currently at 0.3%, we are so far from the limit as to make it difficult to say what the effect of getting from here to there might be. At least from my perspective it is difficult to say, you might disagree.
Actually I've suggested the same idea on Golos - sinse GBG is trading 3-4 times above the peg.
However this reverce conversion seem to be much more effective method.
This suggestion has merit I think.
Simpler to implement I think and simpler for the layman to grasp.
There can then be a push to get people to choose the 100% SBD option any time SBD value is too high relative to the dollar.
I think that's more moderate and adjustable change. 100% SBD sounds good.