RE: Symbiont{s} | ECOBURN | SBD Price Regulation Experiment
Right now, with haircut pricing in effect, SBDs are pegged almost exactly where we'd expect them.
- The internal median price is 0.135 (i.e. the mathematical median, not the price reported as "median" by the blockchain.)
- The reported median price is 0.17062 (i.e. the haircut-based "median" that the blockchain is reporting)
- 0.135 / 0.17062 = 0.79
That's the value that the blockchain is paying for conversions: $0.79.
The external SBD price (reported by @coingecko) is $0.80.
Edited to add: I've been checking this, periodically, since the February delisting, and it has rarely drifted far from the expected value.
IMO, the only way to get the price back to $1 is to get the STEEM price over the haircut threshold. Otherwise, arbitragers will just keep pushing it down.
Also, not a slight against you, but I've seen too many initiatives over the years where someone says "vote for my posts so I can build a war chest to accomplish X", but then a couple of years down the road, the funds are used for some totally different purpose (see @sbdpotato or @crowdfundedwhale). If you want to do this, you should just set the beneficiary to 100% for null, so nobody has to trust you.
Currently, the SBD price is getting closer to the $1 peg; however, market depth remains very low, which makes it susceptible to significant fluctuations. Historical data indicate that market uncertainty within certain ranges invariably undermines arbitrage opportunities and discourages participation. This phenomenon helps explain why the SBD price has consistently remained within a narrowband around its peg regardless of the haircut value.
As the saying goes, code is law. We agree that all mechanisms should operate under a decentralized governance system. What happened with the accounts you mentioned clearly demonstrates that social or community-based agreements do not possess true immutability and can easily drift away from their original purpose. We actually had the opportunity and were able to nullify some negative effects after the Hive split, but it is clearly a path that we should never take again in the first place.
We are in a position where any misuse would result in a much larger loss than if we simply pocketed the fund. While we are not expecting significant support, our goal is to limit funding to a theoretical level calculated to absorb enough value to positively influence the price over a period of 3.5 days. Any excess funds would be burned.