Thanks for the explanation. It seems that pre-HF20 the voting power implementation had some issues where it doesn't elegantly handle powering up/down. Do you think the HF20 changes fully fix these issues and any gaming of powering up/down to extract extra voting power from a unit of STEEM Power?
I believe it does.
Are you saying that VESTS stop contributing to one's manabar one week before they get converted to STEEM? Therefore by powering down some voting power is lost compared to if those VESTS had never been converted to STEEM?
Yes, Steem needs to be at 100% power before powered down (as steem/steem power now has power level instead of voting power), so HF20 will remove whatever is being powered down in the next week so it can charge to 100%. It does this regardless of power.
The way it is explained on GitHub is:
"The result of this decision is that when you power up STEEM, you instantly have access to it at 100% power, but the STEEM must be powered back up to 100% before it becomes liquid. To do this, the week before STEEM is powered down from Steem Power to liquid STEEM, it is not used for voting. This gives the STEEM seven days to regenerate its power."
Missing 0 in bolded number, I believe.
Thanks, fixed.
Got it. Since voting power regenerates at a linear rate of 20% per day, even completely tapped Power will be 100% regenerated in 5 days (less than 7). Hence by powering down, your Steem Power is bound to loose at least 2 days worth of voting influence.
Yes, but you gain it if you power up (or get delegation).
Delegation is something I didn't mention but the same thing. If someone delegates you 100,000 SP and you are low on VP, you will get the full voting power of that new delegation and it will not be crippled by your current voting power. When you lose it though, you lose that power as well.