Let's not bury the lead. Don't power up your post 100% right now! This is insane to do and you're missing larger payouts because of this mistake! Let's go over some economics of how Steem works!
Steem, Steem Power, and SBD
There are three tokens on Steem. Steem, Steem Power, and SBD. Steem and Steem Power have a 1:1 price ration, but serve different purposes. SBDs have a different price point and have contention around how they work and what they do.
Steem is a tradeable token that can be turned into Steem power. It's roughly worth $3 USD right now. It's a pretty awesome token. It moves in 3 seconds. It doesn't cost anything to use. And despite there being 260M of them there are less than 100M that are liquid. It's a nice coin.
Steem can also be "powered up" into Steem Power. When you own Steem Power it's like owning a stock in a company that has dividends. Unlike a classic stock like IBM where you really only have two choices with your dividends (reinvest or cash out) Steem gives you lots of options of what to do with these dividends. The Steem Blockchain has a little under 10% inflation and that inflation goes into new steem tokens that are distributed to authors, curators, stake holders, and witnesses. The more Steem Power that you have the more you can control where those dividends go. By voting (and flagging) you have the power to direct how funds are distributed on the platform.
Steem Power also attracts people to you. People like to follow and interact with folks that have more Steem Power than themselves. This way they can earn a fair amount of money by catching votes through interaction and friendship. There is more visible financial advantage to having whale friends than minnow friends. So, having Steem Power (or even just renting it) can help you grow your following and get sustainable rewards.
SBDs don't allow you to choose where dividends or freshly minted Steem will go. They are simply rewarded when your posts finally payout. These have a different value than Steem. They are currently worth a little less than $10 USD each.
Quick and Dirty Post Reward Math
Here's a post that just paid out for me: https://steemit.com/mspwaves/@aggroed/minnow-mayor-town-hall-tonight-1-6m-youtubers-represented-news-flash-btc-hits-20k
In part because of bid bot use the total rewards listed on steemit.com was $280.
Curators got 59.
I got "$221." This isn't actually listed in USD. It's a mix of USD and SBD.
SBD 110.7
Steem 34.5
It's deciding this price ratio from the average witness price feed you can find by checking out steemdb.com.
The value of those coins is pretty different. If I round SBD to 10 and Steem to 3 then that post was worth $1107 from the SBD and a little over $100 for Steem. If you 100% power up your Steem you're gonna end up with roughly 70 Steem, which could be a nice payout, but it's missing out on the $1107 in favor of something worth $100. That's CRAZY.
So, here's what I'm doing roughly to figure out the math. The total value is 4.3X what's shown on Steemit. The liquid portion right now is basically 4X. If you accept 100% powerup it'll pay you author rewards in Steem exactly equal to what's shown as the author portion, but the challenge is you'd be missing out on nearly 4X the rewards.
So what should you be doing right now?
