I am running conversion/buy SBD cycles for quite some time now with my secondary acc (@doctor-cog-diss). As you might be able to see, I started off with ~150 STEEM, and I have converted them to ~500 STEEM in 4 months ot so. Not bad.
Anyhow, you are not getting 10%. The "internal medium price" for STEEM, that you can see when accessing @steemchiller's Steemworld tool (where you can also convert, btw.), and which is used by the chain to calculate the conversions, is much higher than the actual STEEM price. Apperantly, it takes into account the SBD debt in some way.
Anyhow, I get ~2-3% gain on average per conversion. Which is not bad at all. I will report this whole story by post one day.
So ... the median just gets overwritten ...
I don't code, so I don't know what this means. What I know is: Even when the price was below 30 Cents for weeks, the median was still at 35 Cents. Thus, SBD at 80 Cents did not mean 20% gain per conversion, but you had to calculate: real price / median price = something like 0.82. With SBD at 80, your conversion gain was 2 Cents. And I read somewhere that this was because of SBDs were taken into account for median price calculation.
Can you follow or am I speaking in riddles?
The lines above explain, why and how the median price taken into account to calculate the conversion, differs from the actual median price.
Conversion takes 3.5 days. You don't know the exchange rate at the beginning of the conversion process. If your process would always work, you had invented the perpetuum mobile.
But if you had very much money, you could corner the SBD because of its limited production as follows: Buy a huge amount of SBD, put 20% aside and continue converting the rest in repetition. Thus you will diminish the amount of existing SBD.
Of course.
But as said, this is not the only factor. The conversion rate does not always follow the actual STEEM/SBD median price.
I left out the SBD Marketcap / STEEM Marketcap cutoff, since I was not sure how that exactly worked ...
I'm not sure how it works as well, but it's important to know it before hitting the convert button. Sometimes it makes conversions a loss even tough SBD is at 80 Cent.
Median price ( feed price ) is a value you can just request from the blockchain.
I was looking for it in the code, but do not see where a debt ratio would be taken into account and somehow mixed to the median price ...