Powering down gives you a stream of passive income. If you have enough Steem Power to have a comfortable life powered down without worrying about running out of Steem Power then why not? But it depends on how much 1% of your Steem Power a week represents in fiat.
If you can get over $1000 a week from powering down and live like that for 2 years? It's going to be very tempting to power down for most people.
I am powering down into bitcoin, it's not a payment for me to spend and live off. I already have money to live off for the rest of my life. Holding bitcoin may not seem as profitable as holding steem power right now, but in time bitcoin could be worth $10,000 per bitcoin, and I could have hundreds of bitcoin earned from steem power.
I see your point and have thought the same about Bitcoin in the past. Some of the decisions of the Bitcoin community recently have given me pause and I'm now not certain Bitcoin can go mainstream for technical reasons. I don't think it can scale and I don't know if they can overcome the damage to their brand from Silk Road, MtGox, and the idea that Bitcoin is for hackers (just look at Mr. Robot).
Diversification is good though.
I don't want bitcoin to go mainstream, that would ruin it. Bitcoin can stay where it is now and be a store of value for the 0.01%, and still be worth $10,000 per bitcoin or more at some point in time, sooner than later in my mind
@craig-grant I always thought Bitcoin had to go mainstream to reach $10,000 but perhaps you're right. In theory even if Bitcoin only remains a sort of fascination for top nerds and crypto-geeks in Silicon Valley it is very possible that some of these people will have enough money to push up the price.
But in my opinion Steemit or something like it which reaches the mainstream has much more potential. If you get 20 million people on something like Steemit that could be hundreds of billions in market cap and even if there is a max of 2 billion Steem or something similar, the amount of Steem inflation is not unlimited like some people claim and this means long term even a moderately successful Steem could be in the $100+ range per Steem.
And the scary thing is this thing grows viral. They have code ready which hasn't been activated yet that allows for a referral program where you can a kind of refer a friend reward program. It's the rate of growth that matters for people who are looking at profit from speculating and I think Steem has the potential for the fastest rate of growth according to some research I've looked into on viral spread.
As Steemit grows, it will generate memes and unique content. As the community gets bigger it will become easier to take things viral. As this happens it also takes Steemit viral along with any content which goes viral. Unlike Bitcoin where people are asked to "buy Bitcoin", it's a low barrier to entry and open to anyone who can blog.
"Community-based features perform the best among the
three classes. Predicting the number of meme adopters is a
more difficult task, but our network-based approach outperforms
other baseline models, especially in predicting memes with few adopters"
References
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM14/paper/viewFile/8081/8154