For a long time, I’ve had muddled thinking about the Steem Power you earn for holding Steem Power. Several times, I’ve put on my thinking cap and gone down the rabbit hole. Ten months ago, I wrote the first of what became three posts on the subject, each one getting a little closer to what I thought was the answer. By the third, I thought I had figured out the subject of “interest” paid on Steem Power. Several months passed, and then a question from @azizbd (Interest Return. Any Idea how I can avoid "Interest" on SP? For people who want "Halal" revenue like "Muslim" users.) that I saw in @steemit’s wallet led me to write a post called Interest on Steem Power is Usually a Good Thing. But Not Everyone Wants It. In the comments to the post, @alanfreestone and I discussed interest and usury as proscribed in both Christian and Muslim traditions.
A few days ago, @lukestokes posted If you hold Steem Power, you're earning STEEM automatically (go read it, he unpacks a lot of info).
His first sentence caught my attention:
I realized recently many people don't understand this and many (including myself) get confused by it and think in terms of "interest" instead of "inflation."
Hmmmmm. I had been concerned that interest payments might cause problems with the growth of the Steem blockchain in the Muslim world. If we want to grow from just under a million accounts to hundreds of millions of accounts, we’re going to need people from all kinds of backgrounds.
@lukestokes went on to add
You may have heard the term "VESTS" or "MVESTS" and scratched your head. The official developers documentation glossary describes VESTS as:
Vests is underlying token that STEEM is derived from, and are share in Steem Power
Hmmmmm redux. Vests is underlying token. This is perhaps not a perfect analogy, but I’ve come to see the relationship between Vests and Steem as somewhat akin to the relationship between gold and Federal Reserve Notes prior to Nixon closing the gold window on August 15, 1971. Gold and Vests being the unchanging immutable real money as opposed to the inflationary Federal Reserve Notes and Steem.
When I started writing this post at 5:02 pm, https://steemd.com/@preparedwombat let me know that I had
10,895,565.475455 vests.
And my wallet showed 5,353.415 Steem Power.
An hour later, it showed 5,353.427 Steem Power, what at one point I would have thought of as 0.012 SP in interest.
But my balance of the underlying token is still 10,895,565.475455 vests.
Now I’m certainly no Sharia scholar. But since this shows that no interest is being paid on the underlying token (the “gold” of the Steem ecosystem), Muslims might not have a problem with keeping Halal after all.
image: Pixabay