I'll explain your issue first, and then explain some more confusion from the other comments.
STEEM is way up in the markets the last 24 hours or so - up 40%!
That makes 1 steem = $1.50 -ish. So 45 steem is not equal to 45 usd anymore, it's more like 30 usd, because the money you earned came before the rise in market value, and I think the money is static for the first 7 days until payout. your 32 steem is actually about 48USD right now, which seems correct.
So in reality your 68.174 is SBD is more like 90USD, but with the missing rest - 25% (Though I'm obviously not being accurate with my maths) going to the curators. That's why people curate. It's why whales curate more than post because for them, with such huge steem power, curating is more valuable than writing because they get the majority of that 25% each time.
Basically you just need to not expect the income that you initially see, so your expectation isn't destroyed.
And secondly, 2 years is incorrect! It used to be two years, but one of the Hard Forks changed it to 12 weeks. 1/12th of your money each week. This is very reasonable to prevent people from doing 'pump and dump', or hit and run, or any manner of scams. For example whales that invested early and bought a lot when cheap can't simply run away, and it doesn't cause mass financial panic in the markets.
hi and thanks for your reply, the one mistake you made is that steem and SBD are not separate, we are paid in SBD, some is portioned to steem and put in steem power. The SBD is worth 0.85$ USD so our Steem dollars are currently worth far less than steem which is up, but the SBD is way down, so our direct earning in SBD is worth less than steem so it encourages people to convert their SBD to Steem to keep it in the system rather than have people payed out.
Some things i have noticed is that the value of what i get from a post always decreases over the 7 day period and i have found that is not releated to the value of SBD or Steem. For instance my last post was $103 SBD, by the end of the 7 day period it finished on 90SBD. thats a loss of 13$ as the post became less read and less popular. Meanwhile there are the usual few who always get 500$ + for every post and it never goes down, funny huh?
anyway, i think there is some kind of scamming going on here for sure. I find that even though i get so many people saying my posts are great and i get best writer awards etc, it never goes anywhere and most of my posts and many others can barely get more than a few bucks or even cents if lucky. But the same pumpers always get the same value for their posts which are usually garbage, they just buy their followers, buy a load of steem to pump themselves and stay at the top while the majority scrounge and get nothing.
I think this is bullshit, and im not gonna really waste anymore time on it, considering most of my posts take a few hours to put together, so nah. I vote steemit as a big brown cleveland steamer and not much more.
but thanks for the response.
So im and fin
Suit yourself, I'll enjoy my thousands of dollars ^__^