Respectfully, I find your arguments to keep long term SP contradictory for what you and Steem in general stand for. On one hand we want to give power back to people, on the other force them to lock up their funds. Doesn’t make sense. SP should be eliminated and Steem alone in the wallet can be used in a similar fashion as SP. Let the free market decide if people keep Steem here or take it to exchanges. Justifying 13 week SP with the purpose of keeping people and their funds here sounds authoritarian.
Sure people say if you want luxury of staying liquid you can do so, but that doesn’t make sense. Why would anybody be interested in buying and keeping liquid steem when inflation dilutes the value of steem and doesn’t let them participate in the economy in a meaningful way.
Perhaps its time to give the options for people to set the parameters as they like. If security is the concern, increase the lock up time for savings.
I don’t think Steem continuing to play a central bank kind of role is beneficial. Anything that lowers the power of witnesses and gives more power to users regarding funds would make steem more attractive as an investment. Until then we/steem will be stuck in this semi-centralized/semi-decentralized limbo.
I've made this exact point repeatedly in various witness chats. It seems to me like a natural subject for the next fork post SMTs anyways. First to simplify things in the face of multiple new tokens that will otherwise be a mouthful for new users to wrap their heads around an already complicated platform. Second to judge whether or not inflation-derived rewards from stake-based voting should continue to exist on the main token once SMTs are here.
An ideal situation would look something like this: Steem Power and the STEEM savings account are both removed completely. You simply hold STEEM in your wallet. It can either be liquid (default) or locked for a specific time period. Carrying out actions that require the use of resource credits, or casting witness votes, will necessarily lock the required STEEM to be granted those resources, or the stake that you decide to support a witness with, for a given amount of time (to avoid abuse of resource credits by people who could otherwise swap STEEM from one account to another and take up the available bandwidth). Users can then also themselves lock their STEEM for any given amount of time specified by themselves as a means to add security.
This would simplify things by several orders of magnitude for any new user coming to Steem and wondering what they need to do in order to participate, and what is up with all these different names for basically the same token.. It would also allow for flexibility in terms of different users with a different wish for security versus liquidity being able to choose what they want without us needing to find a "middle ground" which in the end doesn't satisfy anyone.
Finally, we would not have this childish term "Steem Power", which may be cool for an SMT used in a gaming community, but isn't fit to describe the main resource powering an "enterprise-grade" blockchain.
Obviously, this requires a serious rework and a lot of discussions, which is why I believe it deserves its own fork rather than being lumped in with the long awaited SMT fork.
I like your ideas. I hope you will be able convince other witnesses. After SMTs Steem as a currency will have to take a different role to power the larger economy which may require better liquidity and flexibility for participants. I think Steem wallet is one of the best features of Steem, and removing SP would unleash its true power.