What is Steem's "Post Reward Dollars?"

Hello fellow steemians and steemgigers! Today I would like to share with you how exactly the rewards are apportioned when you get payed out. I don't want to take up much of your time so I will just get right in to it.

We all already know that once we get the rewards in our blog-post the actual payouts we get does not reflect the amount shown (amount with the dollar sign) . For newbies this is quite confusing especially those who are not familiar with Steem Backed Dollars, STEEM and STEEM POWER. They usually think that this is U.S. Dollars. Actually It is not even Steem Backed Dollars or STEEM it is something different. I have not found out what they are called but for the sake of calling it something let is just call it "Post Reward Dollars" (PRD). The PRD is received whenever a curator "upvotes" our post. We have 7 days to accumulate as much "upvotes" that we can after which it will be paid out in our internal wallets.

I have always wondered how to compute this

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When the PRD is paid out we can see that it is apportioned to two to three types of currency. STEEM BACKED DOLLARS (SBD), STEEM and STEEM POWER. Most of the time we see the PRD lowers as the week pass by. This is probably due to the available reward pool value that depletes and replenishes. But it is nothing really to worry about since it does not lower it significantly and I believe it is a mechanism to make the platform more sustainable.

Usually we get SBD and STEEM POWER as our rewards. There are times that we can three when certain conditions are met. I don't know yet what these conditions are so let us just consider only the scenario in which we get SBD and STEEM Power. The conversion of PRD to the actual rewards is not that complicated we just have to break it down into 3 steps.

First Step: Author and Curator rewards sharing

PRD is first divided to Author reward and Curator reward. 25% of the PRD will go to the Curators (those upvotes) the remaining 75% goes to the Author. For simplification let us just use a hypothetical PRD of $10. Therefore in this particular scenario $2.5 PRD will be given to the curators that will be divided among them pro-rata depending on the amount they have upvoted. The remaining $7.5 PRD will be allocated to the different rewards currency we have in the platform.

Second Step: SBD, STEEM POWER and STEEM allocation

The remaining 75% of the PRD will be divided to two-three Steemit currency rewards. Most of the time it is usually divided to two SBD and Steem power. However, sometimes it is three (SBD, STEEM POWER and STEEM) whenever a certain price spread condition between SBD and STEEM is met. We will only cover the scenario in which it is divided to SBD and STEEM POWER. This will be 50-50 division 50% will go to SBD and the other to STEEM Power. Which means 50% ($3.75 PRD)of $7.5 PRD is going to SBD and the other to STEEM Power. Thus $3.75 PRD will be converted to SBD which has a conversion rate of 1 PRD to 1 SBD. The other $3.75 PRD will be converted to STEEM Power which has a totally different computation.

Third Step: STEEM Power conversion of PRD

One mistake that I made doing my computations before is my assumption that since PRD and SBD is converted 1 PRD = 1 SBD hence when converting to STEEM Power it should be the current rate of SBD to STEEM. And since ***STEEM *** and STEEM Power has a conversion of 1 STEEM = 1 STEEM Power I can go just convert the PRD straight to STEEM Power. I was totally WRONG on that part. When converting to PRD to STEEM Power you take the PRD value as a US DOLLAR VALUE. Which means PRD becomes USD when converting to STEEM Power. Thus the Remaining $3.75 PRD becomes $3.75 USD and then converted to STEEM Power at the current USD rate of STEEM. Currently the rate of STEEM is $3.96 USD per STEEM. This means that we will get approximately 0.947 STEEM Power.

Actual Results

Let us now test if what I just told you is correct. I recently receive my "Post Rewards Dollars" (PRD) in this blog-post:

https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@ankarlie/steem-applications-bringing-steem-to-more-people

Here I was able to garner around $34.63 "Post Reward Dollars" (PRD). Let us now compute of the Curators PRD and Author PRD.

Compared to the the actual payouts there is a small difference, the reason being that I have upvoted my own post thus I have a stake in it as well. It seems that the curation rewards you get for upvoting your own post is automatically deducted from the curations rewards and added to the Author Post Reward Dollars (PRD). The curation rewards should be around $8.6575 PRD but it showed it only gave $8.05 PRD a difference of about $0.6075. This went to the Author reward that suppose to only get $25.9725 PRD but instead gave $26.58 PRD which difference is exactly the missing PRD from the curation rewards. Now that we have the exact amount of the Author which is $26.58. Now we divide it by two in which we get $13.29 PRD that will be converted to SBD and the other half to Steem Power.

Which is exactly what I got in my rewards.

That is how you compute your payout. In knowing this you can implement the proper strategy on how to reinvest your earnings. You may opt to use bid-bots to augment your earnings and accelerate your reputation but you have to take note that you are getting less than what you have wagered although you will get some STEEM Power that is converted from PRD taken to be the Value of US Dollars not SBD.

I hope you learned something new with my blog-post today. Happy Steeming everyone. Oh if you have any questions, corrections or comments in this post I would be happy to hear from you. Just post a message in the comment section.