Maybe it is common knowledge among everyone who interacts on Steem (or maybe not) that the peg of the steem dollars is broken. We've all seen the SBD potato posts (which alot of people find annoying) plus @thecryptodrive published a proposal to use some of the funds from the SPS to help in that initiative.
I don't believe that these initiatives will accomplish anything. To quote myself:
I think that the intention of this initiative is commendable however it is a drop in an ocean and it will not even make a scratch. At the current prices we need to burn 2.5 million SBD so it would take this proposal 10 thousand days to achive it's goal...that is 27.4 years. Assuming we multiply this effort by 10 it would still take almost 3 years to do it.
With the current inflation rate the blockchain is producing about 30 million steem per year. That has a value of 3.9 million USD or 6 million SBD (at a price of 0.13 for steem and 0.65 for sbd). So burning 2.5 million SBD means that we would need to re-route 42% of the inflation to this. That equals to 100% of the author rewards for 1.2 years.
That is not even considering that with the last HF there is nothing stopping the printing of SBD. The whole SBD pegging mechanism is FUBAR.
The only realistic way that SBD will be worth ~1 USD is if Steem is at least 0.20 USD again. Doing conversions is not good because the market sees that the inflation rate skyrockets and the price will reflect that.
Going forward we need to make sure that the code does not issue SBD via author rewards since the SPS already takes up 10% of the inflation and that triggers the haircut rule faster than normal...In addition we should make sure that there is a mechanism in place that stops printing SBD via the SPS. Maybe have a hardcoded rule that buys SBD from the internal market instead of printing more SBD...or we just live with the fact that SBD will no longer be worth about 1 USD.
In essence, the pegging mechanism was broken with the last hardfork.
This is what I propose:
- Only issue SBD via the SPS.
- That means no longer paying author rewards with SBD.
- If the debt ratio reaches a certain limit the SPS does not issue new SBD but instead it automatically buys it from the internal market.
The reason to stop paying author rewards in SBD is that the SPS already takes up 10% of the inflation and we all know that the haircut rule is triggered when the debt ratio reaches 10%.
As I mentioned above currently the blockchain does not stop printing SBD. If we make it so that the SPS does not issue new SBD but instead it buys it from the internal market under certain consitions we will restore the mechanism that helps the up side of the peg.
I have to say that I am not a fan of the liquid ratio of steem/sbd to start at 9%. I would much rather have it start at 5% and increase/decrease in a linear way.
Due to the nature of the crypto market I don't think it's prudent to have SBD under-collaterlized. We all saw what heppend with the effective inflation rate of steem after the amount of SBD conversions doubled the expected issuance of steem last year. Which in turn affects the steem price and ultimately the peg for SBD.
Let's not make that mistake again.