Fellow Steemians,
I'm writing to you today, to share some light on the current situation with STEEM.
Due to the recent STEEM USD price-fall, an edge-case scenario on the Steem blockchain had been activated and over time became more and more serious & prominent. Now, it's not too serious, but I feel it's important to talk about it, to prevent confusion
For the technical versed people under you, feel free to read this post as well.
But in a nutshell, the following is currently happening:
There is too much SBD available and STEEM has not enough market-cap (fiat_value * supply), which results in multiple consequences.
All posts are currently being paid out to 99% in Steempower & Steem. Less than 1% of the reward is paid out in SBD.
Smartsteem.com is using the correct calculation, however, 95% of the other services are using an inaccurate one.
To change this, I've gone ahead and made a PR for the postpromoter-software, as it's the most popular one. So for everyone who is using it, make sure you update it! And just as a quick side-note: 
When you look on CMC right now or on the exchanges, you'll see that Steem is currently worth around 27 cents. And even though witnesses are representing this value very accurately, the blockchain is artificially holding the value of Steem higher than it's supposed to be.
The 3.5 day average should be around 30 cents, but it is actually at 40 cents, due to the high SBD supply. (If you're interested about this topic, please read this post).
Generally, this is not a problem, however, it becomes one for those wanting to promote posts by paying with STEEM & SBD.
All services (incl. us) have to take the external exchange prices for calculing the value of the transfer, and until now, we also took the internal price for the calculation of the vote-values.
Which resulted in a negative/neutral profit, due to the nature of the external price being incredible lower than the internal one.
A few promotion-service operators (
So what this means is that from now on, we're going to take the exchange prices or better yet, the real 3.5 median price for calculation of the vote-values.
The result of this is, that you're going to see lower values on Smartsteem.com & Steembottracker than on Steemit.com, Steempeak, Steemworld.org & co - but the important part is: they are correct and you're not losing money.
As an example the difference of vote-value of
when calculating it with the internal price of ~40 cents =>81$
when calculating it with the real average price of ~30 cents => 64$.
For developers, feel free to use the code below. It will get the 3.5 median average price.
const calculate_witness_median_price = async () => {
try {
let history = await client.call('condenser_api', 'get_feed_history') // this uses dsteem's client
history = history.price_history.map(x => parseFloat(x.base.replace(' SBD', '')) / parseFloat(x.quote.replace(' STEEM', '')))
return parseFloat(((history[history.length / 2 - 1] + history[history.length / 2]) / 2).toFixed(3))
} catch (error) {
console.error(error)
}
}
Now I understand that for many of you, all of this is a lot. But I just wanted to personally address this situation and let you know that we've taken care of it.
Don't be surprised if you see lower vote-values on your dashboard, than actually on the blockchain. You still received the correct votes.
But if there are any questions, please let me/us know in the comments below or on our discord channel.
With that said:
Keep on being positive! The bear-market will not last forever. Instead keep on accumulating and earning sweet STEEM!
Sincerely,
Founder & Developer of Smartsteem.com
PS: Christmas is coming and maybe, just maybe, the Smart Santa got something for you.. :)