Here is the reason why your potential payouts are going down.

For last few days we all noticed that our potential payouts are decreasing, while hard fork took over in 20th June. We all may be wondering why , well you can guess that one fact is Steem price  is bit lower but there is more reason.

To know that why your potential payouts are going down , first of all you have to know how  payouts are calculated by Steemit.

How to calculate potential payout?

You have to consider 4 important facts :

1. First thing of course the simple one, the price of Steem . The more Steem price rise, the more payouts rate increase.

2. Second one is a bit complex . So the second fact is how much rshares you receive on your post. Steemit uses a formula to calculate the number of rshares on each upvote  using some info. Of user like Vesting Shares(steem power) of the voter, the weight of the vote and the voting power of a voter. For example if a whale gives you an upvote , your post receives much rshares than when minnow upvotes you. 

3. When it comes to the third one it’s the reward pool(reward balance), well this is the Steem balance available to be distributed among all authors and curators.

4. Finally it’s the total amount of rshares are added to all other post (recent claims)

*****Let’s see what these two words ‘reward balance’ and ‘recent claims’ means.*******

 At first I suggest you to search on ‘reward balance’ and ‘recent claims’ in https://steemd.com to find the value of these two important factors to calculate a payout. If do this for several times in a couple hour you will see ‘ recent claims’ is increasing while ‘reward balance’  is decreasing , so simple this is thing which is bad for our potential payouts.

I checked the current amount of ‘reward balance’ and ‘recent claims’ in steemd.com, let’s calculate with that amount:

At this moment the reward pool is filled with 1,097,732 STEEM. This amount will be equally distributed among 160,003,173,250,864,636 rshares (recent_claims).

1,097,732 STEEM / 160,003,173 Billion rshares = 0.00686 STEEM for every 1 Billion rshares.

If the reward balance  stays the same, but 'recent claims' increases. Then the amount of STEEM your receive per 1 Billion rshares decreases. So even if the reward pool and the price of Steem remains the same, your potential payouts can change. It depends on how much the whales vote on other posts than yours. If they wouldn't vote at all, 'recent claims' would decrease, which would increase your potential payout. (unless a whale would vote on your post)

******The Hard Fork 19 and What Can We Expect Next?******

The so called ‘whales-no-voting’ experiment came to end, when Steem forked to version 0.19.0 . So what’s happening right now is whales started upvoting again as a result the amount of ‘recent claims’ is greatly increased. Besides the decrement  of reward pool is  the main reason making your post worth less. Talking about Steem price, it’s only a minor factor to make your potential payouts less because the steem price is not dropped to down it’s just a small change.

Now what can we expect next after all this happening. In next few days and maybe weeks I don’t know exactly , we can hope to see the 'recent_claims' to increase more while the reward pool decreases further. The reward pool has to find a new balance where the amount of Steem going in each day will be equal to the amount of Steem going out each day. I have no clue how long this will take.