The Steem Backed Dollar (SBD) was created at the same time as the Steem blockchain. It was made because @dantheman Larimer, the inventor of the Steem blockchain, believed in the value of a tether coin when it came to attracting long-term investment.
The idea was to peg the SBD to the United States Dollar (USD), thus making sure that the Steem Dollar would always be worth roughly the same as a US Dollar.
At first things seemed to be working nicely, however of late we have seen a failure of the SBD to keep the peg, and currently as of writing 1 SBD will get you roughly $0.82 worth of Bitcoin. In other words, the SBD is worth almost 20% less than it is meant to be worth.
What's In A Peg
Before we go on, for those of you who have little to no idea as to what a pegged coin, sometimes known as a tether or stable coin is, let us just briefly go over it here.
A pegged cryptocurrency coin, is one whose price is pegged to a fiat currency like the dollar or the euro. So for instance the True United States Dollar crypto (TUSD) is pegged to the price of a dollar, in other words, for every TUSD you own, you can cash it in for $1, or at least one dollar's worth of Bitcoin.
As it stands the price of TUSD is currently at $1.01 pretty much where you'd expect it to be.
Peg Mechanics
The next question you may quite reasonably ask is; how the hell do you peg a cryptocurrency to the price of a dollar or anything else for that matter?
Good question.
As far as TUSD is concerned, the whole network is covered by third party escrow agreements.
There are some very specific, and potentially confusing details regarding the exact function of tether coins which we won't go into here. I will simplify the whole process like so:
Joe buys a TUSD coin from an exchange like Bittrex. A third party company (escrow), takes the dollar amount that Joe paid for that coin and puts it into an account.
If Joe or anyone else later wants to sell that coin, the dollar amount is released from the escrow account and given to him.
Like I say, it is perhaps a little more complicated than that, however the premise is simple. The amount of True USD coins in existence, is directly correlated to the amount of dollars held in the TUSD escrow account(s).
As such, each TUSD can be said to be a promissory note, with the promise attached:
I promise to pay the bearer of this token $1
SBD Peg Mechanics
Now the difference with SBD is that there are no escrow accounts being held in its name. Steem Dollars are pegged using its sister cryptocurrency, STEEM.
Herein lies the problem.
Each SBD is backed with $1 worth of STEEM, there is at any one time, at least 20 times more STEEM than there is SBD.
This means that, STEEM can drop to $0.05 and still fulfil its promise to peg SBD.
That is because $0.05 x 20 = $1.
So in a way the SBD can be thought of as a container, whereupon each one, contains $1 worth of Steem. So if Steem is sitting at $0.50, then each SBD will have 2 Steem in it. If Steem is at $2 (I wish!) then each SBD will have half a Steem inside it.
The Problem In Dealing With Abstracts
Every financial system that uses 'promises' is essentially an illusion, it is a functioning one, nonetheless, it is still an illusion.
For instance on a five pound note in the United Kingdom, it says the words I promise to pay the bearer of this note a sum of five pounds.
This rather arcane message, hawks back to the days when they only printed as much money as could be covered by gold. Therefore if you wanted to swap your paper for gold, you would trot off to the Bank of England and do just that.
Nowadays, money is given power through shared agreement and its utility, we all agree it's worth something, and crucially the government only accepts tax payments using fiat currency.
So back to crypto, and in particular the Steem Dollar.
The problem is that whilst we say the SBD is a container, it isn't really. It is merely a reference code on the blockchain. The only way to empty an SBD is to sell it on either the internal or an external exchange.
As mentioned above, a pegged currency acts as a promissory note. SBD however does not, because there is nobody around to make good on that promise.
With TUSD and the Great British Pound, there are external bodies, the escrow company and the Bank of England, who exist independently of the market, to make good on the promise.
That way you can be assured that if you want to get one dollar for your one TUSD, there is an external third-party company ready to make good on this promise, and you don't necessarily have to rely on another individual. In much the same way the Bank of England would have given you five pounds worth of gold in the days before we dropped the gold standard.
But with SBD who do you go to? The internal market is made up of individuals on the Steem blockchain. If it was owned by Steemit inc. then presumably we could go to them, regardless of what Bittrex said the price was, and get them to make good on their promise and give us a one-to-one conversion rate.
What Pegs Down, Must Peg Up
Without getting into the complex financial details of how peg coins like TUSD keep their peg should the price go above or drop below their one dollar peg. We can rest assured that something is being done if the price goes too high, and also if it drops too far below the one dollar peg.
The something that they do, is to do with how much TUSD is in circulation and the size of the escrow pot of United States Dollars. Suffice to say if the price of TUSD drops to $0.85, then within 24 hours it will be back at $1.00.
Similarly if the price goes to $1.05, again within 24 hours it will be back to $1.00.
This does two things, firstly it allows you as a long-term investor to chill. You know that your TUSD is going to be worth a dollar whenever you decide to sell, therefore acting as a good place to keep your funds while you're deciding where to invest next.
Secondly it allows room for the day-trading speculator, who tries to take advantages of the dips and rises below and above the dollar peg. If you had been trading TUSD last night for instance, you could have bought some for $0.85, and then this morning sold it for a 15% profit as it went back to $1.00
This might sound like stating the absolute obvious, however I will do so anyway. The above example highlights how if you are to have a proper peg coin, then you must be able to control the price when it goes down as well as up.
Because anyone can hyper-inflate a coin to drive the value down, but it takes a bit of a smarter cookie to get that value back up.
Peg To Stability Not Price
Unfortunately in all the noise, we have lost sight of the fact that just because something is pegged, does not make it stable, and vice versa.
For example, diamonds and gold are considered stable commodities; why? Because they are finite resources of which there is long established perception of value - we like shiny and sparkly things - and there is a utility - gold is used within computing, and diamonds in industrial drilling.
Therefore whilst there may be slight upwards or downward fluctuations of gold and diamonds. Unless an alien visits and triples the amount of these commodities on planet earth, then diamonds and gold are not going to suddenly crash in price.
The same of course can't be said of the US Dollar. The dollar is constantly fluctuating in value in respect to the other currencies in the world. So whilst the dollar can be said to be more stable than the Polish Zloty for instance. It cannot be classed as a stable asset.
Plus of course, lest us not forget that the dollar is fractionally reserved. Meaning that more dollars are printed based on how much debt is in the system. So the dollar, like every other fractionally reserved currency on earth, is losing value each and every day.
Don't Forget The Humans!
So in August(ish) of this year (2018), the Steem Dollar pumped first to around $2, then $5, then $8 and topped out at a rather impressive $13.
There were various reasons given for this pump, my favourite being that the USDT, not to be confused with the TUSD mentioned above, was going through some difficulties and lots of investors lost confidence in it.
Ergo they switched to SBD, by all accounts they were mainly Korean, as due to Korean laws surrounding crypto, tether coins are very popular over there.
Now I remember having debates with @smooth and others directly or indirectly connected to Steemit, and I suggested we leave the peg the hell alone. Or we peg it to $8.00, seeing as it seemed to sit around that price for some time.
I was told that having a stable SBD far outweighed any individual financial gains.
However what about financial losses?
You and I, and anyone else who uses the Steem platform, were completely aware that the 'true' value of SBD was $1.00. Therefore when we cashed in our SBD rewards, the first thing we did was sell that SBD, either for more STEEM, or Bitcoin.
What about the poor souls who did not know that? What about all those people who bought SBD at $10.00 and above, and who mistakenly thought that they should hold onto their coins for even greater future profits?
Those people have been screwed over, not because of an unknowable variable that crashes the price - like with Bitcoin - but because (some of) the Steem witnesses, deliberately crashed the price for the greater good.
What makes this stick in the throat more, is that there seems there is absolutely nothing they can do to get the price back up to the dollar range should it fall short.
What's To Be Done?
I think moving forwards we should do what we should have done in the summer. Which is leave SBD to find its natural price, this for me represents stability.
Because then investors come in with their eyes wide open, they know that they'll get at least a dollar for each SBD, however it might just average up and be worth more.
I truly believe that it would have stabilised at somewhere between $5 and $8.00, and maybe even survived this latest crypto crash; who knows?
One thing I do know though, is pegging a coin cannot just be backed by thin air promises, it needs real world action.
The other thing I know is, just because something is called a peg coin, does not make it stable.
Let's make the Steem Dollar great again (whatever that means!)
Note: I am not a financial expert, therefore some of the information above may not be 100% accurate. If you believe I have left out some vital piece of info, or that I have unwittingly misread my readers, then by all means feel free to correct me. Where appropriate, I will make changes to the article.
Instead I have thrown the above points into my critical thinking engine (my brain), and drawn the resultant conclusions. The point of this article is not to attack the decisions made surrounding SBD, rather to examine them and to spark debate fuelled by experts and users alike.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT SBD AND TETHER (PEGGED) COINS IN GENERAL? DO YOU THINK IT IS POSSIBLE TO CREATE A PEGGED COIN USING SBD OR ARE WE FIGHTING A LOSING BATTLE? OR PERHAPS YOU BELIEVE THERE IS SOME FUNDAMENTAL FLAW IN TETHER COINS?
AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Title image Leio McLaren (@leiomclaren) on Unsplash
Wondering why we didn't just leave it the **** alone in the first place
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Yup, exactly what I said at the time.
Cg
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I thought SBD’s being pegged were supposed to possibly go up but never go down below a preset amount . Because all markets are crashing it appears SBD’s are just a another crypto. Same game different name......
Just two crypto’s....
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Yup, as I tried to tell people at the time, we should have just left it.
The fact that it jumped so high was a clear indication that it is indeed, another crypto. However people thought that just by saying over and over again, that it was a stable tether coin, and it was good for Steem, would somehow make it true.
Obviously I just stopped making my point after awhile, I was 'convinced' that I was wrong and that everything would be hunky-dory.
So unless that price can be got back to $1 pretty damn sharpish, I was right and they were wrong, it's pretty bloody binary, there can be no in between.
Cg
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Disagree. If literally nothing had been changed in the SBD code, it is a mathematical fact that there still would not be enough backing to support SBD at $1 given the current price of STEEM (or at least at recent lows; technically I'm not sure about the current price, I haven't recalculated). Now we can't say for sure that the price of SBD would be below $1. Perhaps that could have worked out through nothing more than wishful thinking. But in reality, the system would not be guaranteeing what it is supposed to guarantee. Again, this is with no action from the devs/witneses.
The crypto market has just been too harsh to Steem this year (as it was in 2016) for everything to continue to work perfectly. Interestingly, in 2016 everyone blamed the 95% decline on "hyperinflation". Well, here we are in 2018 with another 95% decline and no hyperinflation. It seems things are a bit more complicated.
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It is a mathematical fact. Ohh really, lol ... look where we are now.
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Yes. About 600K SBD was printed after HF20. If you subtract that out, the supply of SBD is still too high.
When it comes down to it, Steem just can't handle 95% price declines without things starting to break and SBD won't be the only thing to break either. Development projects will find their budgets strained, exchanges will avoid listing Steem and some may even consider dropping it, nodes will start to shut down further centralizing the whole network around Steemit Inc, etc.
We need to get our act together when it comes to communicating Steem's value to the market. Otherwise SBD will be the least of our problems.
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We are on the same page Smooth.
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This part is not true. Regardless of what @cryptogee seems to be claiming here, the fact that SBD can, and does, sometimes go below $1 has been part of the design since 2016.
There are no 100% guarantees. SBD is backed to a value of $1 by steem but only as long as STEEM itself has enough value to support it. When there are major crashes in the price of STEEM, as was the case during most of 2018 (and previously in 2016), then SBD is no longer backed to a value of $1 and can go below $1.
SBD aims to provide a stable value which is a very useful thing (which is why the past several months have seen a half dozen or so stable coins released, with a similar or greater number under development), and it does so reasonably well, as long as Steem itself is healthy. Unfortunately Steem is not healthy. It has lost approximately 95% of its value. At that point, things are going to start to break, and they have (and not only SBD either).
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I think the SBD is very important for Steem. What would help is if big exchanges like @coinbase and @bittrex offered USD/SBD pairs this would keep the market pegged to the dollar and help people earn SBDs through commerce. People don't want to buy things with SBD or crypto for that matter because of the BTC pizza delema. They think the SBD will be worth more down the road. Crypto currencies are great but something should be there to help people transfer money for everyday expenses. Steem should be a great storage of future wealth, earnings and SBD should be for buying coffee. This is a complimentary token to the levels of BTC. We hold BTC use STEEM for everyday transactions.
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This wouldn't peg it to the dollar at all, just because you can buy it in dollars does not mean it should be worth the same. The only reason that the TUSD is tethered to the dollar, is because a 3rd party holds money in escrow.
This is not done by the exchange or the coin devs. Hence we would have to do all sorts of deals and somebody would have to take responsibility for SBD for it to be a true peg coin. At the moment we are just hoping it will be a peg coin by saying it over and over again.
Plus, as I mentioned above, a coin can still be worth $8 and be stable, just because you peg something to a dollar does not automatically make it stable, as we've seen with SBD.
Cg
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Yes very true. It would be nice if the SBD is stable but it is just wishful thinking. I guess the way to earn a "stable" crypto is to except usdt ot tusd for services.
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The markets will always be volatile. The idea though is to be generating Steem regardless.
What's built can't be unbuilt. And the technology build on the back of Steemit is incredible.
I can help out villages in Laos with an upvote. Insane.
But the reason for the tumble is that Steem (not SBD) is tied to Bitcoin and ALL of the cryptos are taking a hammering. It just means a bargain basement price for me. Instead of buying Steem at $5 as I once did, I buy it for $0.60. Then power it all up.
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This doesn't really address what I was talking about.
All true, however I was discussing the SBD pump and the way the witnesses manipulated the price back down to a dollar because it was 'good for Steem'.
Agreed, however as mentioned above, this is not about the price of Steem or even why it's going down.
This article was specifically about the price of SBD being lower than a dollar, even though it's meant to be pegged to the dollar.
I also made the point that the fact that SBD is lower than a dollar exposes the fact that it is not a true tether coin, as true tethers have financial mechanisms in place to make sure they never go much above or below (for very long) the price which they are meant to be.
Finally I made the point that the SBD price (as I mentioned at the time) should have been left alone, because tether does not automatically mean stability, especially as the price was $13.
So your points are valid, however we are speaking about two different things and I made some pretty valid points too.
Cg
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the more I hear about this, the less I understand... but thanks anyways
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It's pretty easy to understand now. SBD is only pegged to a dollar because somebody somewhere says an incantation over a laptop.
However incantations don't work, and so when reality hits (like Bitcoin crashing), it takes SBD with it because SBD is not actually pegged to a dollar by any meaningful mechanism.
Unless I'm very much mistaken and a witness is going to come and tell me how and why I'm wrong?
Hello?
Witness?
Witness?
@smooth maybe, are you out there, would love your opinion on this....
No? Okay then. Well there you go, it looks like it's back to relying on magical incantations for us then! lol.
Cg
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and that's ok, we may be going back to a dark age (albeit a digital one) in the world, so practicing a few peppy prayers may be in vogue (-:
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I'm ordering my magic rosemary twigs from Amazon now. Bargain at £49.99.
Cg
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This is not correct. There is a blockchain function which 'converts' SBD into STEEM, essentially emptying the container.
That is the main vehicle by which SBD is pegged to be worth at least a dollar. On the other side, pegging it to not be worth more than a dollar is currently done via dilution, by printing more of it.
Both mechanisms are imperfect but they do work to a large extent.
There is really no such thing as a 'natural price' for SBD. Any market price is a 'natural price' in the sense that buyers and sellers agreed to exchange at that price. The software which implements SBD, and which was created by humans with a particular intent in mind, certainly can affect such a market price. That software was not necessarily ideal or perfect, and it can be (and have been), like any other software, improved via updates.
This is just silly. The actual peg price is an arbitrary number. If we decided to 'peg' it to $8, then the blockchain would issue 1/8 as much of it when it generates STEEM rewards, and the exact same market dynamics that pumped it to $10 would pump it to $80. There is no difference. You can't change the structure by changing the number. (To be perfectly precise here, perhaps it would indeed make some small psychological difference to peg at a different number. My brain struggles to understand the psychological impact of calling something a Steem Dollar and pegging it to $8.)
I honestly don't know what sort of fetish leads people to believe that one particular implementation of software is clearly the best and can't be improved. Do you want to go back to using Microsoft Word version 1.0, too?
The other thing is, blaming the witnesses for the decline in SBD price is really kind of silly. It took witnesses a while to each reach some sort of agreement on what to do and by that time SBD had already declined quite a bit, maybe to $3-5 (I don't recall exactly). Given the state of the crypto market over the past year, expecting a continued or renewed SBD 'pump' even without any sort of changes is pretty far out there. In fact, several witnesses were explicltly unwilling to act, until after the SBD price had already come down closer (if not all the way) to $1, specifically to avoid being involved with directly manipulating the market. (Here is a comment thread from January where I said that was my own preference, and I was not at all alone.) In the end, that is exactly what we ended up doing. SBD briefly dropped all the way to $1 in mid June and then again in early July. It didn't ever go back above $1.50. The code change implementing the looser print rules was merged July 20. (Of course HF20 didn't actually activate until months later.)
The temporary SBD pump up to $10 and beyond was largely an anomaly based on the overall crypto market (and just about everything in it) pumping like crazy for a while. It pointed to some weaknesses in the SBD software, but the SBD software didn't create the pump and the improvements to the SBD software almost certainly didn't play a huge role in deflating it either.
You just don't seem to get that SBD is NOT 'just another crypto' in the sense that most cryptos have a certain predetermined supply schedule that does not depend on external factors like the price. Price in that case is purely left to be determined by supply and demand around that fixed supply schedule. For example, Bitcoin has 21m units, with half created every four years. EOS has a billion units, with new ones created at some low inflation rate. Steem is similar to EOS, etc.
SBD doesn't work that way, and never has. It is created and destroyed in a dynamic manner, based on the the price. So price is both an input and an output, just not an output. People trading it (the "poor souls who did not know that" as you put it) have an ethical obligation to understand what the hell they are trading or suffer the consequences. They can't just assume that SBD is like Bitcoin or EOS with a fixed supply schedule and hope for the best. Or, technically they can (and perhaps did), but they are blindly gambling.
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