It's all about the VESTS!

I analyzed something tonight which I've been meaning to do for a while, and it was quite encouraging. When evaluating the "financial success" of my blogging on Steemit, it's easy to only think in terms of the dollar amount shown next to my posts' author rewards.

That's not the whole story, however.

For someone like me who's interested in Steemit as a long-term investment, increasing my Steem Power is the top priority. At times I play games with SBD conversions in hopes to buy STEEM cheaper in the future (and destroy SBD debt certificates in the process), but ultimately I'm hoping my Steem Power will be the valuable long-term asset which might pay me weekly dividends in the future.

It encouraged me to start thinking about my post rewards in terms of VESTS and not SBD or $$$ values.

Let me give you an example. I recently got this reward for a post I'm quite proud of:

If you scroll back through my blogs and just look at the $$$ values next to the posts there, you might think something less than $20 isn't that big of a win for me, compared to some others I've been fortunate enough to enjoy.

As an example, compare it to this post:

And this comment:

Here's the interesting part. The comparison post actually resulted in fewer VESTS than my sex talk post. 96164.791603 VESTS compared to 101222.237391 VESTS. And the comment which paid out $232.33? That only slightly bested it with 110853.593261 VESTS.

Here's a visual breakdown of the spreadsheet I was using to find these values:

For someone like me who uses SteemWhales to track my ranking (currently listed as #327 by Steem Power), this is really good news! It means the $$$ number next to my current posts should not be compared to $$$ payouts of previous posts. Interestingly, the next post of mine sorted by VEST rewards was actually lower in $$$ than the post mentioned above:

The point here being: Don't focus on the $$$ payouts if your long-term goal is to increase your Steem Power. Just keep creating great content, build a following, and add value to the community.

If you're curious how I got this data so I could play with it (and if you'd like to do the same for your own VEST rewards), here's the process:

1. Download and install the Piston command line tool (thanks @xeroc!).
2. Run a command like this, but use your own username: piston history lukestokes --type author_reward --limit 1000 > author_rewards.txt
3. Import the author_rewards.txt file into a spreadsheet program like Open Office.
4. Use the Data -> Text to Columns feature to split out the "vesting_payout": "96164.791603 VESTS" column to separate columns using ", :, and (a space) as delimiters while merging the result.
5. Now you can sort by VEST payouts to see everything together.

Of course, the easier way to view this stuff is to use @jesta's Steemdb and click on Activity -> Rewards for your account. That won't show all your detailed activity history, but the blue line in the graph should give you an idea of what your VEST rewards have been over time.

Moral of the story: Stay encouraged if you're trying to increase your VEST amount, even if your payouts seem lower than they once were. If this platform and cryptocurrency do become more valuable in the future, those holding VESTS will benefit the most.

I have no idea what the floor will be for the price of STEEM nor what a recovery may look like in the future. I do know I'm still really enjoying this platform and the community which gives it value. Thank you for following along with me on this journey.

Steem On!

Note: The rewards for this post have been set to power up 100%.

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Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, voluntaryist, and blockchain enthusiast. He wants to live life on purpose and help create the world we all want to live in.