Experimenting with PALnet

So yesterday I jumped head-on into the PALnet experience. I claimed my 465 PALcoin tokens, I staked (powered up) 100 of them, published my first post, and spent 5 PAL promoting it. Then I went out to see what happened.

Up-votes

Right away after staking my 100 PAL I tried to see its effects on my up-votes. It was a bit weird, switching back and forth between my go-to front-end SteemPeak, where my up-votes are displayed in its estimated USD value, and PALnet, counting them in PAL coins. I tried up-voting on both front-ends, and it seemed like it came through on both. What gave me a huge surprise was when the first post I up-voted on PALnet actually had less PAL afterwards than before!!! That was because of the coin's volatility, I guess. Though the next attempts showed that with my 100 PAL, 100% vote, at a voting strength in the nineties, the post I voted for would get 0.03 PAL. Cute! In comparison, my 2271 SP add $0.03 USD to a post of my liking, under the same parameters.

On the receiving end things are quite similar: Over the last 24 hours my experimental post got me $6.84 after 213 votes, so far. This is quite typical. On PALnet I also got an additional 0.99 PAL, after I spent 5 PAL on promoting it! For the record, I'm not going to promote this post, just to see the difference.

I have to keep in mind that I only get PAL for the upvotes of those users who have staked PAL. Nevertheless, the number of up-votes is the same on PALnet, so most of those have not contributed to the accumulation of PAL.

Value of PAL

When I completed my post yesterday, the 360 PAL in my wallet were estimated to be around $65 USD. Since then its value went up to $87. Maybe I should sell some of it... Apart from its climbing price, I also got a daily earning of 0.082 PAL. This goes back to the delegation of 103.989 SP to @minnowsupport. So all in all I'm a happy camper.

Conclusion

All in all I'm not quite sure I can say it's really worth the bother for PAL, but then again, after only one day it would be too early to make such a definite conclusion. The blogging platform is the least interesting aspect for me, so I don't think I'll be using it much. Even this post I'm writing with SteemPeak, as it is way more comfortable.

Using the palnet tag doesn't hurt, simply for the additional pay-out in PAL. What bothers me though, is having to use it in the first place. However, it seems like nobody does it anyway! At least the posts that I up-voted had this tag in the second, or even the last place. Great, I'll be following their example.

As for the PAL coin, it also introduced me to trading on Steem Engine, which is refreshingly simple. So even though the coins on that exchange are "merely" little Steem blockchain coins, it's in a way not much different from coins you can find on major exchanges. Steem Engine hasn't been around for too long either, so we can expect trade volumes to increase.

Spending anything on post promotion, be it in PAL, in Steem, or SBD, I still don't think there's a point in it. Though I guess I should wait till the final pay-out before making a judgement on it.

Finally, my delegation is bringing me a small daily reward, and I don't even need to do anything for it. But does that mean I'm going to increase my delegation? Probably not. I still want to keep some SP to delegate to other projects I may want to support, and of course have some for my own up-votes.