Yeah I don't think that is how it works... because you are not trading steem against actual dollars you are trading steem against SBD internally. You can trade back and forth inside the system but as soon as you try to exit, you lose the extra perceived value. It is a little confusing I think and I have been looking at if for a little while now, after reading your post.
This is what I know (I did a little experiment)... right now you can buy .28 bitcoin for $1000 (at least that is what google says)... if you go to blocktrades and buy SBD you can get 1,064 SBD...
then if you take those SBD to the market and trade them for Steem you can get 3,341 steem...
Take those 3,341 steem back to Blocktrades to and trade them for Bitcoin, you only get 0.24419207 Bitcoin, or $883 worth of bitcoin.
I can't quite figure out why such a loss, but I don't think that the blocktrade fees are that high.
I think that because you are getting steem for sbd, even though you get 3.1 steem per sbd you only get to sell each one for 29 cents.
3.1*.29 = .899 and sbd is valued at .92 outside of the system.
does any of this make sense to you?
RE: How you can abuse STEEM network? Very easily i guess.