Most other coins, and all of the successful ones, don't have 8% inflation that you have to fully absorb if you invest without powering up. Day trading is one thing but if you want to hold the coin long term without powering up you are paying a very high price to do so.
Not to criticize but you don't seem to know what you're talking about.
Real investors gladly tie up their money for weeks or years at a time. To invest means to make a commitment. It's gamblers that are afraid to commit.
This is the difference between investing and speculating and gambling.
Gambling is putting your money on what you hope will be a winning position. You don't really buy anything when you gamble, so when you lose you don't continue onwards without putting in more money.
Speculating is buying and hoping the price will go up so you can sell at a profit. The difference between speculating and gambling is that it is game over for the gambler if they made the wrong pick, whereas with the speculator, they have something of value and the option to hold on until they are satisfied the price point meets their objectives.
Neither of these results in economic activity though and that is why they are not investing.
Investing is committing resources to something which has at it's heart an economic activity, i.e. an activity that produces some value. That actually necessitates commitment and commitment on the order of weeks is nothing. Most investments take years to pay off.
Investors tie up money but it is always considered a negative/cost. When it is done, it is done only for good reasons, and the investors expect to be compensated with a higher return.
Stock markets offer liquidity on what may be a years-long investment, but you still have access to get your money out of you need to. There is no contradiction between liquidity and investment.
@smooth Honestly that's the wrong view. Consider the following...
Stocks, the way most people invest, i.e. on the market are also a speculative wager. Unless you happen to buy pre-ipo, you aren't investing unless your plan is to gather dividends. But if you're betting on selling after an increase in the base price of the stock, then that's just speculation.
Almost all companies keep a smallish float on the market and then keep a substantial amount of treasury stock, i.e. stock that isn't for sale. This stock is held within the company. It might be pledged as collateral on a loan, but it isn't liquid.
The vast majority of stocks are penny stocks and OTC stocks, as a result they tend to be highly illiquid. So to are most angel and venture offerings.
In the case of venture and angel capital, there is almost always a vesting period, i.e. a period wherein you are not allowed to sell your stake. This period is often years. This exists so that you don't end up undercutting future fundraising efforts by the entity you have invested in thereby depriving them of needed capital.
Cryptocurrencies almost without exception are not stocks. Stocks confer an ownership right and voting rights in the underlaying organization. They confer a set of well defined and understood rights called Investor Rights and those rights give you a say in the way the company is run. Cryptocurrencies are commodities in almost all cases.
Commodities such as cryptocurrencies follow a different set of rules than stocks. The similarity of their public markets aside, commodities have a production schedule and the purpose of purchasing commodities on the open market is to provide liquidity for the producers to meet short and medium range expenses until they can deliver the contracted for goods.
Steem is unique in cryptocurrencies. Ownership of steem itself is exactly like any other commodity crypto. You buy it, you're supporting the witnesses that spend the time and effort to produce it. However steem as a commodity has no obvious use case at the moment. Transfers are free, so even transfer fees are not a use case as they are in the case of BTC, LTC, ETH and nearly all the others.
Yet steem does have one use case in that it can be converted to something which conveys the ability to have a say in the day to day running of the underlaying network. That "something" as you may have guessed is SP. There is a reason that the underlaying software calls "powering up", "vesting". Notice it's vesting and not investing. You are vesting, meaning to create an entitlement to a privilege or a right in this case that right is the right to direct where a proportion of the daily pool is going to go.
I shouldn't have to explain the difference here, but for those just stumbling in and wondering what the big deal is, allow me to explain...
SP and Steem are fundamentally different things. When you hold SP you get to direct the location of newly minted steem. In exchange for that privilege you are agreeing to remove a chunk of steem from the open market. Doing so increases the price of steem and gives those who must sell in order to pay bills, for instance the witnesses, a chance to receive a better price.
If you can just freely convert back from sp to steem, the net effect is that there is both a lot more steem on the market, thereby driving down the market price for everyone and you are also undermining the system because large chunks of steem being sold on the cheap can powered up by bad actors. Those bad actors can cause a ruckus, potentially scaring away people who really do want to invest and those bad actors are incentivized to do so because lower steem price means more cheap steem to power up and cause even more havoc. If it takes 90 days for everyone, bad actors included to cash out that at least limits the damage. They can't just power down and dump, they have to go slow and this fact, limits the incentive for damage and also the amount of cheap steem they can dump.
I agree with most of what you wrote to a point (I don't agree with your assertion that people don't invest in stocks just because stocks trade in often-liquid markets).
However:
If you can just freely convert back from sp to steem, the net effect is that there is both a lot more steem on the market, thereby driving down the market price for everyone and you are also undermining the system because large chunks of steem being sold on the cheap can powered up by bad actors
IMO this is purely assertion without any real basis in fact.
Making it easier to get to liquidity means that more people will choose to convert to SP in the first place, and more people will be willing to hold SP, rather than preemptively exit. This can easily more than offset the effect of it being easier to get out.
Generally, in all the examples you describe, such as pre-IPO venture capital, when there is more liquidity, the price goes UP, not down. Liquidity is generally considered to be a premium, not a cost. This supports the notion of an increase in demand when exiting is easier more than offseting the increase in supply from (hypothetically) more actual exits.
The idea of a trader or investor needing or wanting to power up is also baffling to me. What sort of speculation does anything beyond an instantaneous power down enable?
I respect your comment but,
Invest and don't power up. Like many investors out there. Like many other coins.
Most other coins, and all of the successful ones, don't have 8% inflation that you have to fully absorb if you invest without powering up. Day trading is one thing but if you want to hold the coin long term without powering up you are paying a very high price to do so.
Not to criticize but you don't seem to know what you're talking about.
Real investors gladly tie up their money for weeks or years at a time. To invest means to make a commitment. It's gamblers that are afraid to commit.
This is the difference between investing and speculating and gambling.
Gambling is putting your money on what you hope will be a winning position. You don't really buy anything when you gamble, so when you lose you don't continue onwards without putting in more money.
Speculating is buying and hoping the price will go up so you can sell at a profit. The difference between speculating and gambling is that it is game over for the gambler if they made the wrong pick, whereas with the speculator, they have something of value and the option to hold on until they are satisfied the price point meets their objectives.
Neither of these results in economic activity though and that is why they are not investing.
Investing is committing resources to something which has at it's heart an economic activity, i.e. an activity that produces some value. That actually necessitates commitment and commitment on the order of weeks is nothing. Most investments take years to pay off.
Investors tie up money but it is always considered a negative/cost. When it is done, it is done only for good reasons, and the investors expect to be compensated with a higher return.
Stock markets offer liquidity on what may be a years-long investment, but you still have access to get your money out of you need to. There is no contradiction between liquidity and investment.
@smooth Honestly that's the wrong view. Consider the following...
Stocks, the way most people invest, i.e. on the market are also a speculative wager. Unless you happen to buy pre-ipo, you aren't investing unless your plan is to gather dividends. But if you're betting on selling after an increase in the base price of the stock, then that's just speculation.
Almost all companies keep a smallish float on the market and then keep a substantial amount of treasury stock, i.e. stock that isn't for sale. This stock is held within the company. It might be pledged as collateral on a loan, but it isn't liquid.
The vast majority of stocks are penny stocks and OTC stocks, as a result they tend to be highly illiquid. So to are most angel and venture offerings.
In the case of venture and angel capital, there is almost always a vesting period, i.e. a period wherein you are not allowed to sell your stake. This period is often years. This exists so that you don't end up undercutting future fundraising efforts by the entity you have invested in thereby depriving them of needed capital.
Cryptocurrencies almost without exception are not stocks. Stocks confer an ownership right and voting rights in the underlaying organization. They confer a set of well defined and understood rights called Investor Rights and those rights give you a say in the way the company is run. Cryptocurrencies are commodities in almost all cases.
Commodities such as cryptocurrencies follow a different set of rules than stocks. The similarity of their public markets aside, commodities have a production schedule and the purpose of purchasing commodities on the open market is to provide liquidity for the producers to meet short and medium range expenses until they can deliver the contracted for goods.
Steem is unique in cryptocurrencies. Ownership of steem itself is exactly like any other commodity crypto. You buy it, you're supporting the witnesses that spend the time and effort to produce it. However steem as a commodity has no obvious use case at the moment. Transfers are free, so even transfer fees are not a use case as they are in the case of BTC, LTC, ETH and nearly all the others.
Yet steem does have one use case in that it can be converted to something which conveys the ability to have a say in the day to day running of the underlaying network. That "something" as you may have guessed is SP. There is a reason that the underlaying software calls "powering up", "vesting". Notice it's vesting and not investing. You are vesting, meaning to create an entitlement to a privilege or a right in this case that right is the right to direct where a proportion of the daily pool is going to go.
I shouldn't have to explain the difference here, but for those just stumbling in and wondering what the big deal is, allow me to explain...
SP and Steem are fundamentally different things. When you hold SP you get to direct the location of newly minted steem. In exchange for that privilege you are agreeing to remove a chunk of steem from the open market. Doing so increases the price of steem and gives those who must sell in order to pay bills, for instance the witnesses, a chance to receive a better price.
If you can just freely convert back from sp to steem, the net effect is that there is both a lot more steem on the market, thereby driving down the market price for everyone and you are also undermining the system because large chunks of steem being sold on the cheap can powered up by bad actors. Those bad actors can cause a ruckus, potentially scaring away people who really do want to invest and those bad actors are incentivized to do so because lower steem price means more cheap steem to power up and cause even more havoc. If it takes 90 days for everyone, bad actors included to cash out that at least limits the damage. They can't just power down and dump, they have to go slow and this fact, limits the incentive for damage and also the amount of cheap steem they can dump.
I agree with most of what you wrote to a point (I don't agree with your assertion that people don't invest in stocks just because stocks trade in often-liquid markets).
However:
IMO this is purely assertion without any real basis in fact.
Making it easier to get to liquidity means that more people will choose to convert to SP in the first place, and more people will be willing to hold SP, rather than preemptively exit. This can easily more than offset the effect of it being easier to get out.
Generally, in all the examples you describe, such as pre-IPO venture capital, when there is more liquidity, the price goes UP, not down. Liquidity is generally considered to be a premium, not a cost. This supports the notion of an increase in demand when exiting is easier more than offseting the increase in supply from (hypothetically) more actual exits.
It's been repeatedly observed that investment does not require powering up. Your point is invalid.
SP is only required to gain VP and RC, which aren't necessary to capital gains or speculation in Steem.
The idea of a trader or investor needing or wanting to power up is also baffling to me. What sort of speculation does anything beyond an instantaneous power down enable?
Fully agree!!!
You're a dick, but I agree with you on this one.
More usecases = good and Value Steem.
Powerdown period does not affect the price in a big scale.
And btw if they want power there can lease steem... i think everybody forget about this.,...
Am I right thinking that powering up is necessary to get the inflation on the steem you own?
yes and no because if you vote you get a return in curration rewards too.
STEEM POWER increases at an APR of approximately 2.19%, subject to blockchain variance. See FAQ for details.
Thats if you power up
I second you to the fullest
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