You may have noticed that your pending rewards for many of your posts are falling each day. This might lead you to believe your upvotes are being retracted or it is a consequence of the recent hard fork change. This is probably not the case.
What you are actually seeing is the effect of the reduction the price of Steem has experienced in the last week. The current price of Steem is $1.94. On the 19th it was as high as $2.23. The pending payouts of posts move in proportion to a moving average of the Steem price. So if the price of Steem falls over your payout window, your payout will reduce accordingly.
However, the impact is smoothed. So if the price dropped by 50% in the final day, your payout would not feel the full effect of the decrease. The inflationary effect is based on an average price change over a few days (although I’m not 100% clear on the exact averaging period).
On the plus side, when the price is going up, your payout will inflate. A few weeks back when the price of Steem soared, my pending payouts inflated by 30/40% in some cases. I thought I was getting late upvotes by a couple of whales but when I saw it was happening across a number of posts, I realised it was just the effect of the rapidly increasing Steem price.
The table below shows a snapshot of my pending payouts yesterday and the value of those payouts today. The first few are recent so it’s difficult to strip out the effect of the steem price. But you will see the older posts (from a few days ago) have fallen by about 4%. Some have fallen 3% and this is because I have received upvotes on these posts in the interim period which has partly offset the deflation.
Hopefully, the price of Steem will turn around so we can start enjoying some inflation!
Thank you for reading.