High SBD values definitely correlates with user activity, and I believe that it is also the underlying causality.
As an entrepreneur working in ICO consulting, online courses and having just recently cofounded a tech start up and gotten funding, I have also started out as a blogger looking to turn Steemit in to one of my revenue streams. High SBD rewards make that possible - I am using the high valuation to buy steem and build a respectable presence on this platform.
While a stable currency backing Steemit has some very real use cases, I believe that the inflated SBD is bringing in users - from personal experiences, any friends that I have recruited have come primarily to make a profit blogging, so the bigger the rewards the better.
If I was deciding, I would do as follows:
- Hire a statistician to try and definitely find a correlation and causality between growth rate and SBD price. (I'm not a statistician, but with an engineering background I'm pretty handy with maths and would happily provide some figures on this until you get some solid figures for sure).
- Leave things the way they are until the active user base increases to a lot more than what it is now.
- Create a Steemit-wide poll and ask users what they think. Not sure how to make a poll on this but I'm sure there's a way to get to nearly every active user.
- Based on correlation results and user survey results, make a decision. Maybe the solution is to make the exchange ratio 1:2.5 instead of 1:1, but without some concrete stats to back a decision, it's hard to say.
I hope this helps!