I joined steemit around July 17,and began learning the ropes.  I've played with upvotes, posts, and comments, but I'm mostly an observer at this point.  When I joined, I knew nothing about SBD, and the STEEM price looked promising.

https://s31.postimg.org/gv0n7qw4b/steempic1.png

There had been a recent downturn, but there had been some sort of hack on July 14, so that didn't worry me.  I figured it would be a short drop, then a turnaround.  So I read the whitepaper and set about lurking and learning.   And what has amazed me is that after the hack was cleared and STEEM experienced a brief recovery, it reversed course again and steadily resumed its downward course.

https://s32.postimg.org/tqtkhvs6t/steempic2.png

Meanwhile, my son had a couple posts that actually paid out.  (Here's one https://steemit.com/music/@cmp2020/the-first-part-of-my-symphony).  So we had to figure out how to diversify his holdings.  From my reading of the whitepaper, I believed that we had to convert from SBD to STEEM, wait 7 days for the transfer to complete, then exchange the STEEM for BTC, so we kicked that process off for most of his funds (and we're still waiting for it to complete).

After doing so, however, I learned that SBD could be directly exchanged for BTC (not sure how I missed that in the whitepaper,  or maybe it's new?).  Fortunately,  my son had some additional SBD come in from curation rewards, so yesterday we successfully exchanged that for BTC through the Bittrex exchange (https://bittrex.com/).

Meanwhile, I continued to be puzzled as to why the STEEM price continued falling, but this morning, I think I worked it out.

https://s31.postimg.org/rqmgh6u0b/steempic3.png

That graph shows all history of SBD-BTC trading.  So, the SBD market was apparently established on July 18, and it nicely tracks with STEEM.  Launching at about $2 and falling steadily to about $0.85. 

So my theory is that STEEM demand dropped when people learned they could liquidate their SBD holdings without going through STEEM as an intermediate step.  Now, $0.85 should be more or less stable going forward, as $0.15 probably represents the risk premium associated with the 7 day SBD to STEEM conversion process.  If  that holds steady, STEEM should have hit a bottom and now be free to start reflecting user growth again.

*All graphs courtesy of coinmarketcap.com
**Opinions reflected here do not represent financial advice.  Do your own research.