The SBD on steem to me is a very powerful and amazing feature of the blockchain. Today I was watching the witness forum by @aggroed where @andrarchy was talking about all the hard work steemit is putting into build competitive functionality with limited resources.
One example mentioned was the account recovery feature as something steem has that other blockchains like bitcoin do not. We are currently in a crypto bear market and value creation is what will bring us forward and separate steem from shitcoins.
I agree this is exactly what steem needs.
One other such amazing features to me are SBD. I know of no other blockchain that has an intrinsic stable coin. Yes stable coins are being built ontop other blockchains like DAI or achieved with backed collateral such as Tether and others, but having a stable token as part of the core protocol provides some additional benefits.
Good for people building apps
I am one of the many people that are trying to built applications ontop of steem and having a currency to do business in is an important feature. For www.steem-bounty.com it is important that bounties can be described in SBD and thus stay consistent over time.
Think about the many applications on other blockchains, especially Ethereum that simple do not work because transaction in something volatile just does not make sense if the time horizon is more than a few minutes. A great example is Augur, which has many issues, but most of all I think cannot work as long as predictions are denominated in ETH. Augur has less 100 user per day. Predictions run usually over some longer timeframe and ethereum was 50% higher a short wile ago. If you made a prediction and gained 50% your entire win could be wiped out. Gamblers don't want to make two bets in one.
Good for user that need to protect value
I have recently done something I have never done before (but would have liked to do when the price was at $8): I cashed out some steem. I powered down over 10k of SP and converted them into SBD. That is about 20% of my holdings.
The reason why I do this is simply to protect me agains total loss of value in steem. I have seen steem trade for $0.07 and won't be shocked if we are going back to below $0.5 range.
In the past I have not sold any steem for one key reason: I did not want to exit the ecosystem.
Did not have to exit
Because I can use the internal market and sell steem for sbd right on the blockchain, I did not have to go to an exchange and cash out my steem. Instead I got some SBD for my steem on the internal market and moved it into savings.
It is still in my steem account, right there. I only switched between tokens.
This is valuable for me
This is valuable to me, because I can protect some of the value my account holds. It allows me to hedge against a further loss of the token value and will provide an easy way to increase my amount of steem that I hold if this event occurs. I plan to convert all of my SBD into steem again at some point in the future, hopefully in a way that makes me more steem than I sold recently.
Very importantly I can be loyal to the steem ecosystem, without losing value.
In any other blockchain or token project this cannot be done without using fiat and an exchange of some sort.
This is good for steem
This is valuable for steem as well as I have not exited out of steem (as my funds are still all in my steem wallet). It will allow me to buy back steem when the price goes lower, which will provide some price support for steem.
So this is not something that only benefits users, it also keeps the steem price a bit more stable.
We really need SBD to work
I urge everyone on here to appreciate the value SBD bring to the ecosystem and come up with a way that will keep the SBD peg work in both directions.
I am pretty sure it will work to the downside. We need to bring it down as well when it goes up. @timcliff has provided some great solutions, please support him and others working towards that end.