My Delegation Has Run Out
Today the delegation I bought from @blocktrades expired.
I was offered my delegation of 9885 SP again for the "discounted" price of 1053 STEEM.
I was surprised as I had originally bought this for 690 STEEM. This is a 53% rise in price in the last 90 days.
I then realized that Blocktrades was offering delegation again and looked to see what the sticker price would be.
It is now currently 1135 STEEM that would buy me the same amount of SP delegation 90 days ago.
1135/690 = 1.64 = 64% inflation of price.
Dangerous Territory
A problem I see with this is it takes an extremely active person to break even when it comes to renting one of these delegations. It almost seems that a rise in price would make it even harder for people to break even.
What happens when you don't break even? People will start to up vote themselves more, maybe flirt with the line of abuse or straight up abuse by creating an account and up voting it to give themselves money back.
Following information could be radically wrong
Lets do a little math. I have found this roughly to be true, that 10k SP can give you a 1 SP up vote. I found this out when steem was at a $1 in price, and my 1k steem would give me almost exactly 10 cents. After buying the delegation of around 10k, I found myself to have over a dollar in upvotes, and it seemed to match. If my up vote is worth vests or STEEM. And the price of posts is based off of current market price averaged over 3 days of recent trading, than you have 1SP up vote for 10k SP.
If you want to buy 10k SP, for 1135, that means you would have to gain in both curation rewards and personal up votes, 1135 STEEM back to even break even.
If you got 50% from curation, HA, and you got 50% rewards. You would have to post and up vote yourself 568 times. 1135/2 = 567.5 or 568 times.
568 divided by the 90 days is 6.31111111.
You would have to up vote yourself 100% 6.31 times per day for the duration of your rental. And this has diminishing returns as at 98% VP, you would be giving less SP per.
You should only give out 10 100% up votes a day. That is a 63% up vote just to get half of your rewards back.
The other 568 STEEM would have to come from curation, meaning an average daily curation reward of 6.31 SP.
The best I could get with 11k SP was 5.225 SP of curation rewards in one day. So if I could get my best of 5.225 every day for 90 days, I still would not be getting enough SP to break even, meaning I would have to up vote myself EVEN more, to get my initial investment back. Let alone gain any profit from this.
Now, this does not take into account inflated prices of SBD which could offset this. Utilizing the inflated prices of SBD definitely helps to get into the positive range. But even then, it wouldn't seem like it would make that much of a difference when trying to make back such a large sum of STEEM.
My advice would be to not buy a delegation for the current prices. I understand demand is high, but don't get fooled into giving away your SP for a few months of powerful up votes.
-BiasNarrative