I disagree with these changes. This is why I am now powering down.
Steem Power isn't supposed to be liquid and it loses it's value when you change it from being a long term stake to being just another speculation toy. These changes will make Steem another toy for pump and dump speculators and offer no beneficial change for people who want to be involved with Steem for a period of years.
Steem the token need not be a toy for speculators. Steem Power is not going to have demand no matter what the inflation rate is, as long as it is hard to buy Steem Power by the mainstream user. In my opinion effort should go into UI, UX, ease of purchasing Steem Power, security for Steem Dollar peg, more utility for Steem Dollars, more gamification elements to make people want to hold Steem Power.
But I do not support these changes as I do not think it is in the long term interest of Steem. It might benefit some Steemit developers and founders who want to liquidate their Steem Power faster but it's not going to make Steem Power more attractive or add any utility to Steem. These speculators add no utility to Steem and in the long term it makes Steem Power less attractive. We should be going the opposite and trying to make Steem Power both more attractive and even less liquid. The cash out rate should be dynamic in my opinion based on the market cap of Steem if we are to add a change at all. But there should not be the possibility of founders or people who have a lot of Steem Power (myself included) to dump without waiting at least 2 years, and if the price of Steem goes down we should wait even loner I think as the rate should slow down if the price decreases for Steem.
How are rewards on the platform going to be paid for? Because people using this platform want to earn steem power they don't want to pay for it. Every social media site is free, if you start relying on users powering up to pay for their own rewards it's not going to work. Investors with heavy pocket are the ones who are going to pay for the rewards and today ( as the price shows) these investors are not interested at all in locking their steem for 2 years and losing 10% of their stake every year.
One other thing you fail to recognize is that the hyperinflation puts a downward pressure on the price of steem which means a downward pressure on the rewards of this platform, not to mention that this pressure is exponential the more you print the harder you will be able to get a high steem price.
Steem power's purpose is to be able to curate and participate in the system that's it.
You say that these changes add nothing of value to steem but one obvious thing is the faster distribution of power , I have spoken to many investors and most don't invest in steem because they think the platform is rigged and rightly so.
SP holders loses 10% of their share per year with the current set up with the new set up they will lose only about 8% because a small part of the inflation that was previously used for rewards will be allocated to steem power holders, so this proposal is actually beneficial to steem power holder
Short term liquidity, short term value, and there is no proof or evidence that the crypto community of speculators is enough to make a difference. A customer is better than a speculator for a long term income stream and everyone knows that. A casino might generate some income, but the casino which runs out of gamblers will run out of players. Steemit just isn't fun enough to keep attracting speculators and the crypto community as a whole isn't fun enough to attract enough speculators to have any sustainable growth.
If you believe Steemit can run on speculators then why didn't it work for Bitshares? Bitshares is like heaven for crypto speculators and did everything possible to appeal to speculators, but even at it's best it never had over a $100 million dollar market cap. In my opinion, if you want to appeal to speculators why not tell people to trade Steem Dollars and hold on to them for the 10% interest? We need speculators for some utility in that but then when speculators just leech or come at the cost of long term interest then I have a problem with it.
Appealing to speculators is fine, add a new toy for speculators in addition to Steem Power if you want, such as prediction markets or whatever, but don't reward speculators at a loss to the only real supporters who believe in the long term future. The long term interested player is the most valuable player in the game. Think of it like subscribers? Which subscribers get the most credits, the most benefits, the most rewards? The most loyal subscribers!
In my opinion the rewards should shift to reward loyalty as a way to make the product and platform more attractive. Focusing on quick profits will make Steem nothing but another crypto toy coin to pump and dump. There are many coins just like that so speculators have no reason to care about Steem and I think any pump you see in Steem will ultimately be temporary until something more appealing comes along or until they discover Bitshares which is even more appealing and based on the same technology. I see this as not only a bad strategy, but I see the change in language going in the wrong direction as well.
The developers are changing the narrative into a common crypto-coin narrative. This might be appealing to people who like to trade crypto-coins but the vast majority of mainstream people don't speculate, don't care about crypto, don't care about Bitcoin, don't care about "strong hands" and "weak hands" or use any of this crypto lingo that I'm seeing now. They only care about quality content, and they think in terms of subscription fees which they pay, for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and magazines. Advertisers can be attracted and made to buy Steem Power but instead of putting effort on building the attention economy it seems the developers would rather take the easy way which is just to fiddle with the distributions and fundamentally change the economy.
This is a problem because it reduces confidence long term supporters might have had. Now we can see that there is less developer support for the long term vision and more focus on getting the money out of the platform and appealing to "investors" instead of making the platform more appealing to "players" or "users". Do we see any other social media platform talk about trying to appeal to investors over the users? If the goal is to make it a better experience for users then the price of the Steem token is based on the utility Steemit can offer and if Steemit isn't offering enough utility then build that utility so people have a reason to power up. If people don't have a reason to power up now, they wont later, no matter what the inflation rate happens to be.
I support building out the platform to make it easier to power up and to make people not think about Steem Power as just $$$ or think of Steem tokens as a currency. But if Ned wants Steem to be a currency, then it's his choice, but in my opinion this goes against how Steem was originally sold to long term supporters. The rules of the game can change, but to change it so suddenly before the original contract has run it's course or expired, is like voiding the original contract and leaving people who agree with the original contract left to the will of "democracy" which of course is going to be dominated by people who may have an interest in cashing out as soon as they can. I mean while I hold a bit of Steem Power, some people hold like $100,000 of Steem Power and don't you think a few of them might want to cash that out as quickly as possible so they can buy Bitcoins or a house or whatever?
But then how is the price supposed to go up just because people might think the inflation rate of Steem is lower? All that means is people can dump the price even faster, as it will not encourage people to power up and may in fact encourage everyone down to even the smallest holders to power down immediately before this change happens.
Some parts of it are good ideas and I'm not against every little detail but the point is, I think we should stick to the original contract at least until the 2 years are up. I recognize we can renegotiate a contract but the renegotiation seems to be fear based, and greed based, rather than based on what is in the long term best interest of Steem. It's not just about how much SP holders lose in terms of percentage, it's about increasing the utility and desirability of Steem Power and of Steem, even if it means we may have to see the price of individual Steem tokens decrease. As you know, I haven't started powering down until very recently, and it's only because I see less and less confidence from the people who have the most stake. I took on the attitude that the price of Steem is irrelevant as long as the utility of the platform continues to increase.
I agree a higher price of Steem would mean we bloggers can get paid and blog more often so I'm not saying quality of content isn't correlated with higher Steem price because it is. But I am also saying, adding utility to Steem Power is a way to raise the Steem Price indirectly by making more people hold Steem. Just reducing the inflation rate is not enough if demand isn't increased for Steem Dollars and Steem Power, and for Steem exclusive content and social networks.
I share a lot of these thoughts, but speculators can add value to Steem in the form of market liquidity.
Do you mean lessening the rate of powering down if the market cap is lower? I strongly disagree with that idea, stakeholders shouldn't have to guess what they may or may not be able to power down in the future.
I think stakeholders shouldn't "invest" in Steem Power with the hope of a ROI in the same form they bought in. I think if you buy Steem Power it's because you believe in the long term the utility of Steem Power will increase your actual wealth in the form of "feature access" and attention economy benefits. These benefits aren't clear now because we need a million users or more, and a lot better build out before it makes a lot of sense, but if someone believes Steem could really challenge Reddit then holding Steem Power is like holding Reddit Gold on Steroids.
I also think it's possible to pay people dividends or make advertisers buy Steem Power. I cannot understand the strategy of trying to get money from a very small group of speculators in the crypto community who barely have a billion dollars as a whole and probably wont choose to put it in Steem or Bitshares no matter how hard you try to attract this very tiny demographic.
Advertisers on the other hand are a huge demographic and then you have customers who might subscribe for VIP or premium service which is also a huge demographic, and are both mainstream demographics.
And yes I think it should be dynamic. I think when the price is going down the speed we power down should decrease indefinitely. This would make us all want the price not to go down no matter how much or how little SP we have. When someone has a lot of SP then being able to power down faster is going to be attractive no matter what the market cap is but for someone with very little SP maybe they wont mind if powering down is slower when the market cap is lower. We should at least discuss this idea.
Why should we reward people for an unprofitable platform?
That's setting network rules for heavy handed top-down market manipulation in my eye.
Price is down? The network forces everyone to cut supply. Totally artificial. I don't like the idea.
If you think that is bad then let's keep everything as it was set from the beginning. But if we are going to manipulate then it should be adaptive to market cap and not to transient preferences. There should be a formula which determines things and not public opinion.