Official Proposal For A Variable Amount To Power Down - Github Issue Opened
If you start powering down, the entire amount of your SP holdings is divided by 13, and then you receive every week one of these 13 installments in your Steem account. The underlying logic of this was that people have some "skin in the game" and it was tied to the whole Proof Of Stake design across Steemit. But as more people started to use the platform, more use cases emerged.
One of these uses cases was presented to me by @everittdmickey, which, in short, suggested that we could have a variable power down amount. This amount should be no more than the allowed 1/13, obviously. The suggestion makes a lot of sense, because many people don't need their entire amount of their SP, just a smaller portion of this, and not all the time.
As a witness, for instance, I would only need the equivalent of the server costs, no need to start a full power down that will deplete the account in 13 weeks - and with it my voting power. Of course, I could stop power down, keep what I need from the converted amount and re-power up the rest. But it's complicated, time consuming and adds more transactions to the blockchain.
I opened a Github issue here, if you feel this would be beneficial, or if you have other opinions, please go ahead and comment. If we can convince the developers this is a useful feature, it will be included in future upgrades of the network (or hardforks, as we call them here). Be polite and relevant, please.
Thank you.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
Agree no more. The powerdown process should be dependent on 1)how much steem power you have 2) how much you are powering down. 3) limit. I think for a certain limit, one should be allow to power down in much shorter time and if it does not represent something like 10 % of total power. This is basically same when u power down whole week 1/13 and you will get back about 8% in one week, but people may wonder why the whale power down everything.
I don't think I understand, can you give me an example?
Yes, for example, the limit to power down per time is 2000 sbd if you have more than 20000 to 50000 sbd. Then if you power down 2000, you should get a faster treatment than power down 5000. And if you choose to speed up the power down process, you can only use it once every month.
Still don't understand. First, sbd it's Steem Backed Dollars, they're already liquid, I suppose you mean Steem Power. If you have 13000 SP in your account, the withdrawal time is 13 weeks, with 1/13 (1000SP, in this case) of the entire amount every week. Are you saying if we power down less than the entire amount, we should get it faster? How fast? I still want to understand your proposal, it may be something that I obviously overlook and it may prove beneficial for other people.
Sorry i will try to do my best. Let take an example, a guy who has 10000sp, he just want to get some petty cash, so he decide to power down. If he power down full amount, it will be around 8% . But in fact, he may want more than this and because if this 1/13 rules, he needs to wait further but at the same time, his power down will not impact the liquidity of steem because amount is small.
So instead, we could set a cap let say 10% for those who want to cash out occasionly with say 3 days. And once he utilize this cap, he need to wait a month to recharge or if he want to cash out in the standard form, now he needs to take longer than 1/13 week to cash out.
Thats WAY too convoluted..
Oh got it now (or so I think). So, if a user wants to cash out quickly, a bigger percentage of this entire stake, he can do it once, for an amount set at 10%, let's say, but then he will have to wait for a while until his/her "withdrawal power recharges. That's an interesting way to put it but I doubt it will be easy to understand and I have no idea how many users can actually grasp it. But I'm writing it down as a further improvement, once the participation is really big.
Thanks for taking the time to explain :)
I was thinking about something like, once a month you can take out 1/26th of your total SP instantly and if you were going to do a real power down immediately after then it would add 3 1/2 days to 7 days you receive the first payment.
I do agree that most people get in to situation where they need a small amount and not looking to power down the hole amount but need the money fast. I think something like this would solve that.
As it looks, there are many ways to skin the "power down cat" :) I'm taking this into consideration as well.
When I ever reach a significant amount of Steempower and wish to power down, I would probably only want to withdraw a small amount. More likely I would just stop converting SBD to Steempower and just use the SBD to trade whatever I want.
Interesting situation.. I was in a similar situation where I only wanted access to a specific portion of my SP.. ya you can power down for one or two weeks but thats not the point.. Its also psychologically easy to keep powering down (especially if you take a little tolerance break).
People are renting out their SP now for cash - I think that development has made the "lock in" moot.. why not change it to 3 days like the savings account - people who hold Steem off platform might be enticed to lock it in somewhere secure assuming they can get it back in a reasonable time frame. Renting SteemPower has changed the game imo. If you were a company wanting influence - why lock money up for 3 months when someone will rent it to you for a fee?
That's an interesting way to see it too.
At this point - I dont think anything done do to this site will stop Steem's ascent as a currency.. They have already basically handed the project to the community to further.. Quicker/partial power ups and downs make sense going forward - especially since they have put the pressure on us (the users) to bring in new users.. From what I can see - if I want to bring a friend on here tomorrow its gonna cost me 15 steem to buy an account - then I haven to figure out how to "take care of them".. Maybe I want 10k SP to help them get started but I dont want to make a huge time commitment.. renting SP at this point really does seem like the right answer even though its more of a system exploit than design! Its been fun watching this site inch closer to what it is meant to be - but what that looks like is still being written!
the whole powering-down process was unclear to me, your post gave me a good idea how this actually works... so thanks for that free primer.
aside from that I totally agree, I personally doubt I would ever want to fully power down unless I decided to leave steemit for good!
Being able to do a "single-power-down" instead of a "full-power-down" makes absolute sense to me!
This actually makes sense @dragosroua. We should be able to get only certain amount that we need, which as you said shouldn't be more than 1/13th of allowed power down.
It certainly has some benefits, like keeping more SP in the platform. The less liquid and asset is, the more expensive, so that may contribute to a higher price.
Yeah. Why the hell only power down all the SP?
Lets say I have 10K SP and want a new computer and get 1000SP out.
Now I would have to power down (all), then stop it after 2 weeks and power up again?!? bloody stupid.
I would even be ok with the 13 weeks, but not being able to choose the amount you want?
thanks for supporting this.
And for 2 weeks you would look like a douche powering down ;) j/k I agree this needs some refinement.
The idea is very good! In less than 10 hours I'll have first power down. And I think it will be more useful to set: I want to power down 100 steems and after first week to receive 1/13 of my Steem and in second week to receive the difference (around 30 steems).
The use cases can get really complicated, but for now I think the easiest way would be to allow the user to specify a fixed amount each week, ex: 100 STEEM (from a maximum allowed of 1300 STEEM/week). And if we gather enough user information and if there's enough demand for more specific patterns, then obviously we can implement them as well. But just having that would be really nice.
I don't check the Steemit code, but I don't see nothing hard to implement it. :)
For me has more sense to say to the system:
Me: I want to convert 300 steem power into Steem!
System: You will need 4 weeks to do that. Do you agree? (Yes/No)
Me: Yes.
Then, after 1 week: 80 Steem(that mean 1/13 of my total Steem power)
Second week: 80 Steems
Third week: 80 steems
And in 4th week only 60 steems.
Ah, got it. It's a more specific use case. I think it can be implemented once we gather more user input. As it is right now, 13 weeks is an important number in regard to the total expected Steem on the market. It has to do with "maturation of shares" if you want, and it needs a bit of predictability (or so I understand).
Ok, I got the idea! It's not a coding limitation it's a business logic limitation. :)
Thanks for explanation!
good news!!!
Yeah i agree it should be more flexible and with the caveat you mentioned about 1/13. A percentage option below the threshold would be much better and help with bloat although i know it handles transactions well above current requirements.
Will transaction bloat be a factor in the future ?
It could be, right now we're very under the threshold, but so was Bitcoin 5 years ago.
cheers