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I've been chatting with my friend organist @contrabourdon about the reward pool and implications to delegations to bots.

Say, you have 100 SP and upvote your favorite author or a comment. You surely have noticed that the value of such upvote doesn't even reach 0.01 USD.

Take a look at Upvote Calculator here:
https://steemnow.com/upvotecalc.html

If you adjust the upvote value, you can see that in order to upvote with 0.01 USD one should have around 500 SP currently (upvote value fluctuates with Steem Price of course).

But remember that if you upvote a comment, anything with less than 0.02 USD doesn't go to the author whom you are supporting and returns to reward pool.

For an upvote to reach 0.02 US one should have around 1000 SP with today's Steem prices.

So imagine you earn or buy 1000 SP (this would be around 390 USD investment today). And then if you want to maximize your investment, you delegate to some for profit bot.

This way you can get even 18 percent APR but what about your community you're supporting?

If you delegate to the bot most of SP you have, your community gets almost nothing.

Then in turn other people have no reason to support you and your community reach stagnates.

Of course, we also have to take care of ourselves and some argue you put the oxygen mask on yourself in times of emergency if you are on the plane.

This makes sense. So it's a question of ethics and perception. Are you in an emergency here on Steem? Some people are. But not all of us.

For people living in struggling countries, like Venezuela, they need these Steem rewards to feed their families. But even then, some portion of the rewards are best left for future investment otherwise people will never get out of poverty, if they are only thinking about today.

For some, Steem means long-term investment and they don't plan to cash out very soon.

But remember, it doesn't matter if you try to maximize your ROI or not, if Steem price doesn't go to double digits or more some day in the future, then everything we earn hear is still kindergarten money.

All our hopes for future returns are based on Steem price rise.

But for this to happen, people need to buy Steem from the exchanges and power it up. In other words, supply needs to be less than the demand.

For me, if my situation doesn't change dramatically, I don't plan to start cashing out until Steem reaches 10 USD. But even then it would be only 25 percent. Another pricepoint to cash out 25 more percent would be at 100 USD per Steem level and another - at 1000 USD level.

It's just my fantasy perhaps but a cool one...

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