Steem Basic Income
Steem Basic Income is a social experiment to bring a basic income to as many Steemians as possible. Members join by sponsoring others into the program. Steem Basic Income is delivered through providing regular upvotes to member content.
Introduction
As a subscription upvote service that utilizes Steem blockchain to deliver a sustainable basic income, we are completely dependent on Steem blockchain reward mechanism.
In Part One, we explored what drives value on Steem.
Vote Values in Steem Basic Income - Part One: Blockchain
In Part Two, we explained each of the factors that determine how we allocate value within the SBI system, and how those four factors are handled under our manual system.
Vote Values in Steem Basic Income - Part Two: The Way We Were
In Part Three, we explored how the four factors are handled in the new system that we just released a week ago.
Vote Values in Steem Basic Income - Part Three: Where Are We Going?
Today I would like to focus on putting it all together. To do that, we will focus on the new balance tracking and upvote delivery systems. This part isn't about where the value originates, which is covered in detail before, but on how the value is tracked and delivered.
Member rshares Balances
When a member is initially enrolled in successful enrollment transaction, we start tracking an rshares balance for that member. That's the most accurate tracking unit possible in STEEM.
Based on enrollment level and participation in each of the four previously explained value factors, the member rshares balance steadily grows.
Upvote Delivery
Each time a member posts, we check their rshares balance. If they have enough, we deliver an upvote that uses 20% of the member's rshares balance. If they do not have enough, the post is skipped. Sometimes skipped posts would receive a catch-up vote later when their balance grows large enough.
Why 20%?
The biggest complaint that people had about the old manual system was the sudden and dramatic swings in vote value.
Imagine a member was receiving a 2% upvote regularly. Because of the way the tracking worked, that could have been a calculated range from 1.50% all the way to 2.49%. Suppose that the member was posting 4x per week, and their calculated value was 1.55%. The next week that member posts 5x, and their calculated value drops from 1.55% to 1.24%, which rounded to a 1% upvote instead. That's only a 20% decrease in their calculated value, but the received upvote value dropped by 50%! Ouch!
Technically that member was receiving extra value while rounding up from 1.55% to 2%, and it comes out of the later value when they're rounding down from 1.24% to 1%, but . . . that isn't exactly a comfort if they made decisions about increasing their enrollment level based on the 2% upvote value.
Posting Frequency
Under the new system, a member posting two consecutive posts with no time for their rshares to recharge in between would receive 20% of their balance on the first post. The second post will receive 20% of the remaining balance, so the second upvote would be only 20% smaller.
Since most frequency changes are not two posts back-to-back, most changes in upvote value between posts will be smaller than 20%. The balance would partially recharge during the time in between posts.
Vote values between posts will always fluctuate because STEEM price feeds are constantly changing, but even if STEEM prices held constant, the vote value would fluctuate with the changes in member posting frequency.
What is your average interval between posts for your last five posts? If your most recent interval is longer than your average, then your vote value in rshares will increase. If your most recent interval is shorter than your average, then your vote value in rshares will decrease.
The key takeaway is that SBI value is calculated based on time intervals, but delivered via post upvotes.
A member with 1000 SBI that posts 1x per day would receive the same weekly value if they increase their posting frequency to 10x per day, but their votes on each post would get progressively smaller as they transition from the lower posting frequency to the higher posting frequency.
Minimum Upvote Values
A totally new feature in the new system is minimum upvote values. Instead of spewing dust votes, we have opted to set a target minimum upvote of 0.01. If your rshares balance is not at least 0.05, then it cannot support an 0.01 upvote, and your post will be skipped until your rshares balance grows large enough.
The value from a skipped post is not lost, it remains in your rshares balance until successfully voted.
Recommended SBI Levels
Important Reminder: This section is NOT financial advice, and SBI is NOT a financial product. This section contains recommendations to help you reach common goals for how many people use SBI. You should review Parts One and Three to help you identify how to use SBI to reach your own goals.
For most of the last year, each 1 SBI has delivered a weekly upvote value of 0.01 SP. That may not hold true for ever (see Part 1), but as long as it does there is a relatively easy way to determine how much SBI to target.
If your goal is to get an SBI upvote on every post, then you need to subscribe at $1 worth of SBI per post per week. With STEEM at 0.33, that means you need 6 SBI to get one upvote every week. When STEEM goes to 0.40, you will only need 5 SBI to get an upvote every week. At 0.50 STEEM, you will need 4, etc.
If you are posting more than one time per week, take that number and multiply by how many posts you made this week. So with STEEM at 0.33, you would need 6 SBI * 7, or 42 SBI to get an upvote every day.
If you want to ensure that your posts always reach payout from SBI alone, you need to double that value again.
These calculations only include the value from your SBI levels. Bonus units from delegation would work in much the same way, but upvoting rewards are linked to your upvote value, not to your SBI levels, and you would need to factor those in separately.
What about ROI?
To be explicitly clear, Steem Basic Income is a completely voluntary subscription-based upvoting service. Calculating ROI will always be complicated for Steem Basic Income. An accurate understanding of the value factors in SBI is critical to correctly understanding your upvote value.
Your own behavior (or external factors) may change the total values, and you will get results that are different than you expect. There are no guarantees in life, and the only guarantee we can make is that we will always try to offer fair treatment and provide a reasonable way out if we make changes that you think are unfair.
The most accurate way to estimate potential return would be to ignore factors 2, 3, and 4 as factors that are not related to your initial subscription amount, and compare the current weekly upvote value per unit to the current subscription price per unit (1 STEEM if you are generously enrolling others, using it as a contest prize, etc or 0.5 STEEM if you are coordinating with a friend to sponsor each other or enrolling another account that you control).
We do this in our tracking sheet, and we even strip out curation and add back in SBD premium to print an estimated annual return. This appears in the Summary tab as "Simple Return per Unit". This is not a guaranteed return, but an estimate of the results currently available to an active member if nothing changes. There are many factors that influence this value, and the biggest factors are things that we have no control over.
To facilitate doing your own calculations, we publish the weekly STU's per unit every week in our weekly delegation report. As we resume a more consistent posting schedule, we may include this in other updates as well. Conveniently, at the current reward pool equilibrium, the STU's controlled by each unit are about 1% of the STEEM price. This has been the equilibrium for many months now, if you skip over the period where the reward pool spiked right after HF20 because not enough rewards were being claimed.
We have no idea how long to expect this equilibrium to continue. We're not leaving unless STEEM goes to literal, actual 0, and we hope that you're not either!
Enrollment
If you want to get involved, or to increase the share of basic income that you receive, enrollment is pretty straightforward:
Just send 1 STEEM to @steembasicincome. Include the name of a Steemian to sponsor in the transaction memo (preceded by @). You and the person you sponsor will each receive 1 share in the program. You can sponsor any active Steemian, it does not have to be a current member.
If you're unclear, please check out our full transaction memo guidelines and then let us know if you have any questions.
@steembasicincome/steem-basic-income-updated-transaction-memo-guidelines
The official currency for enrollment is STEEM. Please allow up to 7 days for your enrollment to be processed.
Questions?
Please read our recently published FAQ. Most questions are addressed in our FAQ or in the additional resources that it suggests. If you still have questions, ask in the comments section or join us in our discord channel. To review your share counts, we recently introduced our new SBI Member Lookup Tool.
