Hi @phgomo thanks for taking the time to write this, I want to preface my reply with a suggestion that if you do further posts on this topic that you make them decline payout posts if indeed your intention is for the good of the community and not for rewards and making a name for yourself on the back of these initiatives. That is something of concern ofcourse and not meant to offend in any way.

Firstly @sbdpotato has nothing to do with price or value, it is purely to reduce the oversupply of SBD so the debt ratio can be reduced below 10% and safe for other members of the community to do conversions without suffering the haircut loss.

If you look at the @sbdpotato api https://sbdpotato.herokuapp.com/conversions it shows that about 5500 sbd are being converted every 3.5 days and growing each day, this averages down to 1571 SBD converted per day.

Just recently sbdpotato reached a milestone that it is pretty much neutralising inflation, if you see https://steemd.com/@steem.dao around 66 SBD are printed per hour which is around 1593 SBD per day, as the @sbdpotato fund grows it will actually be reducing SBD inflation instead of just keeping it at bay. I don’t agree that either @burnpost or @sbdpotato are deterring investors, just recently there was a massive 10 mil steem deposit that pushed the price up to 20 cents temporarily.

This account here https://steemd.com/@cherrytomato2 is also recently stacking STEEM and a increased holding to 3 mil, all this is happening while potato and burnpost are allegedly chasing away investors due to the trending page posts. I would argue that investors see these posts and realise there are people trying to fix the Steem economy and feel more comfortable to invest.

I myself feel more comfortable holding my stake now that the @sbdpotato initiative is in place.

I agree with you that stakeholders should support Steem based projects, I don’t however agree that such support needs to be mutually exclusive, they can and should support all worthy initiatives including @burnpost and @sbdpotato. We have reduced trending page pollution down to one potato post per day capped at $20, if the trending page can’t absorb one such post per day then I fear we are already at the stage where we are “fighting for pennies” to borrow a phrase from your post.

Potato needs to convert circa 1 million sbd to restore the debt ratio, the Steem price rises this value required becomes less, when steem pumped to 20 cents, less than 300k SBD needed to be converted to fix the debt ratio. After 3 months when potato has accumulated 25k sbd as per the proposal, it will be converting SBD at a rate of 25k every 3.5 days. The posts help get there faster.

What would help get there even faster is if a majority of trending page authors would set @sbdpotato as a 5 or 10% beneficiary and stakeholders were to change their voting habits to vote for posts that give back to economic initiatives such as @sbdpotato and @burnpost rather than 100% lining the pockets of the post creator, if the support is great enough we could see the debt ratio and peg fixed in as little as 3 months or less.