A topic I get asked a lot is "Should I sell my SBD and if so, when?" The truth is that this question is more complex than even your average request for a crystal ball rental. The reason for that is SBD are, in theory (and often previously also in practice,) a pegged currency. They are not pegged to the US $ technically, but rather pegged to 1 US $'s worth of Steem (admittedly, a minor distinction.)
In the past month, there has been some discussion about whether the SBD peg should be more strongly enforced (scroll to the bottom for links). I've only recently caught up to speed with some of the later posts in this particular saga, but from what I can tell the view of the majority of the witnesses is that SBD should be pegged. Their position is also rather logical - there is no real point to having two volatile coins on one blockchain.
On the other hand, the majority opinion (not by stake, but by users/authors) is to allow SBD to continue to float on the positive end. The idea is that the higher rewards help authors and drive both engagement on the platform and new users. Also, the general philosophy includes a preference for free market forces deciding the price of SBD.
One reason the SBD price is so high can be seen in my recent post about Korean volume - it's huge, for both Steem and SBD. However, it's truly nuts for SBD. I followed the entire CoinMarketCap currency list down to SBD at #228, and not a single coin was even close to turning over as high a percentage of their market cap daily. SBD turned over twice as much, or more, as the closest competitor I found in the top 240.
If you take a look at the following image from CoinMarketCap, you can see where I've written how much of each currency's total market cap (in percentage) is traded in the daily volume.
SBD's volume is over 10x the nearest competitor, and it is way more than 10x the average if you look at the other coins on this page.
Another worrying situation is the increasing divergence of market cap and bitcoin price from the dollar price of SBD. Take a look at the following chart, particularly the area highlighted in red:
What you are seeing above is a near-all-time high in market cap for SBD, even though the dollar price was almost 3x as high 2 months ago. That means if you sold SBD today, or back at $14, you sold at roughly the same market cap or total valuation of SBD.
This is because everyday SBD are produced as the Steem blockchain pays out rewards for posts on Steemit. Very few of these are currently burned, as nobody is using the conversion command (it was recently removed from the GUI, so even uninformed users can't use it) and few SBD are burned for access to the promoted tab. The end result is a higher supply of SBD, so in order to maintain the same market cap, price must continually go down.
This natural effect of supply and demand on SBD is likely what we are seeing trail the price down from recent highs. Add to this the tail risk of the surprise addition of a Steem -> SBD conversion option as proposed and favored by many witnesses, the odd nature of the high volume and it being centered around the Korean Upbit exchange, and on balance I think you have a much higher risk for similar or less reward holding SBD instead of Steem.
Could SBD go much higher, or the Steem/SBD ratio go much higher? Sure, and that's probably what will happen if Bitcoin continues to retake its gains toward 20,000. However, will SBD gain faster than other options and with less risk? At the moment, I'm finding it hard to make that argument.
I won't tell you what to do with your SBD and I'm not bearish on Steem. However, I'm going to start converting the ones I have stashed away into Steem at my earliest convenience. There's zero chance Steem gets pegged, and Steem is fundamentally more useful than SBD.
Here are some posts discussing the potential for repegging from last month; feel free to take the temperature there yourself:
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@reggaemuffin/witness-discussion-sbd-price-and-reverse-peg
https://steemit.com/sbd/@lukestokes/should-sbd-be-a-pegged-asset-if-so-when-should-we-peg-it
https://steemit.com/steem/@aggroed/still-in-defense-of-a-high-sbd-why-witnesses-should-not-implement-steem-to-sbd-conversions-now
I'm not calling a top here (a bit late for that), and I'm sure the market will immediately make me look like an idiot, but that's my take.
In completely unrelated news:
Sources: CoinMarketCap, Bittrex, Aggroed, Reggaemuffin, Lukestokes, Wikipedia
Copyright: CoinMarketCap, Bittrex, Pinterest.com, Hypertomb.com
