Backgrond
From the white paper
STEEM is constantly increasing in supply by 100%
- Steem Power rewards: For each STEEM created by the above rewards, 9 STEEM are
divided among all Steem Power holders.
So Steem is created at a rate of 100% a year, and discounting rewards, SP should increase by 90% a year.
The problem
So I noticed when looking at the steemstats website that my SP seemed to be increasing at a rate over 200%. At first I thought there may be a problem with the calculation of the rate, but I can confirm that the numbers on the site are correct up to a week's range, ~4%, which would extrapolate to >200% a year.
Using numbers from the website steemwhales the STEEM:SP ratio is 37:963 or 96.3% of the value in the site is in SP, so if all of that SP is increasing at a rate of >200% there must of been a change to the 100% creation rate of STEEM or a change to the SP rewards.
I reached out to @jesta the user that built and runs steemstats and he seems to confirm that the 100% inflation rate may be off
What the program is doing is watching your accounts as long as you have the page open, and determining how much SP per second you're increasing. Then it extrapolates that number out to a year worth of seconds.
I'm curious to know exactly why they say 100% but it looks like 200%+ as well.
Conclusion
I have not seen an announcement regarding any change in the creation of STEEM. If my findings are confirmed (A big if) it would not affect the value you have in Steemit if your value is in SP, but if you are holding STEEM it would be devaluing at a much higher rate than it is designed to (50% a year).
A thought I have that could in theory explain it is, what happens when you power down, does your SP continue to increase while powering down? If not the extra SP could be distributed across all SP holders that are not powering down. If this explanation is correct it would mean ~59% of all SP is currently powering down. HOLY CRAP I thought I'd look through some of the whales on steemwhales and indeed 7 out of 10 of the biggest whales are powering down. Is this a problem?
edit: I used steemstats to look at one of the powering down accounts and there SP seems to also be increasing at a rate of over 200% a year, so that would seem to disprove the possible reason I put forward.