Being an active part of the steemit.com community means you will be earning Steem Power and Steem Dollars for successful posts and Steem Power for your voting of other good stories. This essentially increases your influence thanks to the further increase of the Steem Power you are holding as well as allows you to easily cash out by selling the accumulated Steem Dollars.
But the accumulated Steem Power can also be turned out to regular STEEM tokens via a process called Powering Down. This part however is not very well explained and can be confusing for new users and probably even more advanced ones are not completely aware of how that actually works if they have not yet tried it themselves to discover it by experience.
The explanation is that when you Power Down your Steem Power says that it will require 2 years and 104 payments to convert back to STEEM tokens, but how exactly this works is not explained very well.
What the above actually means is that once you initiate a Power Down you will start receiving 1/104th of your Steem Power in the form of STEEM tokens each week until you have withdrawn all of your tokens or you manually cancel the power down process, so you can actually withdraw STEEM, but it is a slow process and is divided in small parts.
To initiate a Power Down of your existing STEEM POWER you need to go to your steemit.com Profile page and navigate to the Wallet section.
Click on the STEEM tokens on the right of your STEEM POWER balance and select the option Power Down.
You may be required to relogin as a means of confirmation to initiate the action.
At any time you decide you want to stop the Power Down you can click there again and just select the Cancel Power Down option that will appear.
Here is an example of how things should work, let us say you have 104 STEEM tokens in the form of Steem Power and you initiate a Power Down. In exactly 1 week you should receive the first of the 104 payments that should be 1 STEEM, after another week you will receive 1 more token and so on every week for the next 2 years.
You can of course cancel the Power Down the same way you have enabled it and can restart the process again at any time you wish to. If you cancel it before even 1 week passes, then you will not receive anything, if you cancel it after 1 week and you have received STEEM token(s) you can keep them even if you cancel the power down. If you restart the Power Down a any time it will start from the beginning, dividing your current Steem Power balance to 104 equal payments and executing one each week.
If you manage to accumulate a lot of STEEM POWER thanks to being a great steemit.com content contributor thank with the help of the Power Down option you will be able to convert some of that power to STEEM tokens that you can transfer to other users or sell on a crypto exchange etc. Transferring all of your STEEM POWER at once is however not possible at this moment, probably as a safeguard set in place to sustain the steemit ecosystem long term.
thank's! Steem is not really easy for newbies
Finally I understood what is power down! Thank you!
Thanks so much for clarifying that! I am a new steemer and had no idea how the power down worked. Great post you have here, upvoted!
Great article
Thanks! I finally understand how seemit works now!
perfect!! congratulations
@cryptos, how does this calculation take the 90% interest per annum into account? Or does that stay in additional to the outward payments of your origional investments? thanks!
steemit's interest is 90% per annum? @.@
No, not any more. it is now 2% for steem power holders. and about 9% for steem overall (7% is what is paid to content creators and curators and 2% for steempower). when the interest rate was 90% the steem price was going down so the community decided to vote to change it to 9%, which seems to have worked in terms of stabilising the price.
ah ok... yea, 90% interest rate is pretty much impossible for a strong economy. Imagine USD inflating 90% per year!
Where can you see the interest being paid on the steem power?
I just keep up to date with steemitblog. This is where the most up to date info about steemit is. however, if there is a live running statistic somewhere, it would be great if you can let me know! ;) cheers. https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/final-review-of-steem-economic-changes
Thanks @cryptos for this great informative article. I have a better general understanding now of what it means to power down.
This way steemit can go away before you collect all your earnings. Pretty smart since I see no real monetization of this site!
is the monetization any different than the Federal Reserve of the USA printing magical money in the 1920's, and then hiring you to clean up dirt from the streets in exchange for said magical monies? Then you can use those magic monies to trade with other Americans! :D
This is an old thread, they changed it to 3 months:
https://steemit.com/steem/@beanz/powering-down-going-from-104-weeks-down-to-13-options-to-power-down-slow-and-other-ideas
Thanks for the link I was hesitant to power up reading that it would take 2 years to power down. I like the 3 month option better and plan to power up as often as I can! Fairly new here but I'm in for the long haul!
is this what it is now? 3 months? because i'm seeing on mine that it says the same (2 years,104 payments)
Yes 3 months, check again. You can power down by going to your wallet and clicking the little gray down arrow next to Steem Power and then choose Power Down
This article is very helpful for me as a new user.
Simply explained, thanks for this.
Brilliant, and I feel that if you mean to earn STEEM and a small cap, you will use the ecosystem to the 104th degree. Amazing and so real.
Hi there I believe this has changed to 13 installments over 3 months? Please correct me if I am wrong.
Yes, this is true:
https://steemit.com/steem/@beanz/powering-down-going-from-104-weeks-down-to-13-options-to-power-down-slow-and-other-ideas
Why must it take 2 years?
Thanks! You made this very easy to understand!
Brilliant post. Exactly what I came to learn about and now I leave with crystal clear understanding of steem power.
I see, makes sense. Would it not be better for the website to add additional power downs for "x" amount? lets say you power down every week because your huge on this site. so by your 4th power down your not getting an average, your getting the total of you first 3 power downs. week 54, would would be getting 53 "so to speak little payments combined" Just a thought
Thank you for info. How to convert Steem Power to money?
Thank you. This was very helpful.
Thank you.
This kind of simple, to the point answer was the most clear that I found. Thank you again.
I feel like there needs some kind of training or tutorial site to know how to use Steemit right! Keep up the great posts...
This should be pinned somewhere, much easier to understand!
Of all the articles i've read concerning power down..i think this is the best of all.Thank you
thanks for this post!it helps a lot for someone new on steemit!
I'm brand new to this platform, thank for the clarity in your explanation; very thorough and easily understood
excellent guide, simple and complete :) thank you