Why you are being paid in STEEM, and how to predict your payouts

Unless you've been using Steem for a many months, you'll be used to receiving only SBD and Steem Power when your posts payout after 7 days.

You might have noticed that in recent payouts you have received some of it in liquid STEEM. This isn't a bug, but a normal consequence of a little known financial mechanism that Steem uses to keep the proportion of outstanding SBD below a particular threshold.

This article explains it quite well, but the cause is basically the sudden fall in the Steem price, as it tracks the rest of the cryptocurrency market lower.

Unfortunately, due to the SBD being much higher that its expected $1 USD, the variable amount of STEEM that needs to be printed, depending on market conditions, makes the expected payouts harder to predict. Relatively small price changes can affect the payouts significantly.

Despite this, I have updated the Steemreports Post Payout Forecast to include the STEEM amounts that you are predicted to receive.