Steem Proposals Blockade

If you look at the Steem Proposals right now, here's what you see:

• 35 proposals asking for funding
• 165,147 SBD total funds in the @steem.dao account
• 1,651 SBD daily budget for proposals

And yet, only one true proposal barely makes the threshold to receive funding: the Keychain Development Proposal by @yabapmatt, asking for 100 SBD / day for 182 days (167 days remaining). Which means the rest of 1,551 SBD go back to SPS every day and don't fund anything.

But not so long ago, when the return proposal received another big upvote, there were actually no proposals receiving funding for a while. Everything was returned to Steem.DAO, every hour of the day.

I'm sure this is not how Steem Proposals System was conceived to work, but it is the current status quo, which resembles much like a blockade.

While initially the return proposal was meant as a way to keep undesirable proposals from accessing funds from SPS, at this point it certainly looks like it behaves as a blockade, since it's almost impossible to get through.

A blockade is easier to put in practice when many steemians have become inactive and many of those who are active are not interested in SPS, or they at most set a proxy. Proxies can be played strategically though: look at @proxy.token (bigger influence than @blocktrades), mostly being set as proxy by accounts in Asia, from my understanding.

One of the points touched at the Witness discussion from Steemfest - expiring a witness vote (and I'd add any proxy which was set) for accounts which are no longer active for more than 1 year - would help, by removing from decisions accounts which are long time inactive.

What is the reason for this blockade?

I'm not the one imposing it or even participating, so anything I say below is pure speculation, but I did try to figure out why would someone want to keep the threshold so high, despite the obvious discontent this raises among the people who expected SPS to become part of their funding.

As far as I can see it, the current market conditions play a big role. And the fact that SBD is not really pegged to USD, and funding from SPS is 100% SBD. I've seen some are trying to reduce as much as possible the distance to $1 SBD (see @sbdpotato for example).

SBD pegged to US Dollar would offer the stability necessary to benefit both developers and any business on Steem, most likely. But this has been a highly debated issue, and we haven't come to a working solution to keep the peg, as far as I know.

In the meantime, what do we do?

Do we keep the blockade, hoping for a bull run or the next alt season?

Am I missing something here?