Hi fellow Steemers... This is going to be a controversial post but please bear with me...
I love steemit and recently decided to invest further into the platform. I was doing a transfer of some Bitcoin into Steem Power, which is what I wanted. However, I made a small error and instead bought Steem Dollars. After realizing this I was like no worries... I'll simply just convert my Steem Dollars into Steem Power and all will be good.
After doing this conversion I looked at the net result and had substantially less Steem Power than I expected. After some digging this is what I found. If you convert 1000 Steem Dollar to Steem Power and then convert the resulting Steem Power back to Steem Dollars you end up losing about 14.4% of your total investment value. Please see the screenshots below that show this process.
Now I can understand that the exchange might cost you 0.5%-1%, that would be expensive but still understandable... In this case the cost is 14.4% which is completely nuts. Please can we get together and recommend that this be changed. It is not fair to be charging this type of premium for conversion. I'm not sure who exactly is pocketing the spread, however in order to resolve this we might need to:
- Get BlockTrades connected to a more fair exchange or
- If BlockTrades is taking the cut, this needs to be reduced
I can understand the argument that Steem Power is meant to be locked into the platform so as to ensure some stability in prices. But charging a 14.4% premium is not a practical way to implement this, if that is the come back argument. The transactions were also completed in about 5 minutes so the market did not move materially.
Pic 1 - Converting 1000 Steem Dollars to Steem Power
Pic 2 - Converting 1047.552 Steem Power back to Steem Dollars
