@poss I understand why many people think that the potential payout shown by a post or even the past payout amount for an author is in USD - Because there is a damn $ in front of that ($) 11.53 that you saw.  When SBD was practically pegged to $1 USD it made sense for users and when users upvoted a com$.ment they had a pretty accurate idea what it was actually worth.  An upvote of $.25 was worth a quarter.  However now when for arguments sake SBD is worth $8 - that $.25 upvote is actually a $2 upvote.  The 11.53 or the .25 is actually an amount of SBD.  That is why when you ($)11.53 payout at 50/50 rewarded you 5.765 SBD - which is precisely 50% of the 11.53.  I'm guessing that STEEM was trading below SBD at the time of your payout if it was recent, and the .836 SP makes absolutely no sense at all as a payout in monetary sense.  $40 worth of SBD roughly and only $4 of STEEM ?? There is a major issue with the Steemit pending/actual payouts on the platform and I've seen a lot of requests on Utopia.io to correct the issue - Even the account balance shown in our wallets is still based on a 7 day and 3 day average trading price of STEEM and SBD - why isn't it just an actual wallet price based on real time prices or prices for the previous day? When logging into Busy.org it shows your wallet to the T of the actual value.

Om Utopia.io I read a few people mentioning that the pending or past payout amount wasn't estimated in SBD either and rather STU (Steem Token Units) whatever the hell those are - LOL

Last thing - another oddity is that the pending payouts of mine last week had been going up from day to day (even without any additional upvotes) yet the price of STEEM was rising and the price of SBD slowly retracting.  

I don't know what is exactly the case but I think there is a glitch in the Steemit Matrix with Payouts, SP payout skimming and the price of SBD - @broncnutz was right when he said a lot of big payout reapers were converting their SBD into STEEM as soon as the reward was redeemed and making a killing by getting 4-5x the amount of STEEM - I just pray it wasn't a malicious act of driving the SBD price up by manipulating the exchanges so the massive Whales could pack on more winter fat. 

Hope the comment makes sense  - please respond if you have figured out anything further with the payout methods and or what exactly caused SBD to skyrocket just in time for Christmas when like OG said - it has no real purpose as a coin and does not run the blockchain