Do you know it takes a long time to withdraw STEEM from STEEM POWER? And it is a much longer time than you expected a transaction will take.
What is Power Down
First thing first. If you were new to steemit, you probably have never power down before. Conceptually, it means withdrawal of the STEEM locked in your STEEM POWER to your STEEM account in your wallet. After successful withdrawal, you may trade or transfer the STEEM in your STEEM account as you like.
In your wallet, click the down arrow next the STEEM POWER. You will then see the menu pop up.
After you click Power Down, you see the default amount of STEEM to be withdrawn is your total STEEM POWER - 5 STEEM. It is a steemit recommendation to have at least 5 STEEM locked in STEEM POWER for your on-going steemit activities.
Let's change the withdrawal amount to 1 STEEM and see what happen.
You will see the text message changed as "That's ~0.1 STEEM per week". How about withdrawal of 10 STEEM...
and finally, a test for withdrawal of 10,000 STEEM...
With a big enough number (e.g. 10,000 STEEM), we finally see the formula.
10,000 / 769 = 13
That is to say, if you had 10,000 STEEM to withdraw, you will only receive 769 STEEM a week.
It will take 13 weeks to complete the withdrawal
If you tried to google search "steemit power down" to further verify, you may find quite a lot of articles saying it take 104 weeks to completely power down. Those were written long time ago about the old steemit rule.
The rule of 104 weeks time to power down is OUTDATED
The original design long time ago was to lock up the STEEM probably for a more stable price. But later on, the rule changed towards a better liquidity. 13 weeks may still sound too long to be accepted. However, it also enhance the security to a great extent.
For example, if your steemit account got hacked. It will take 13 weeks for the hacker to completely transfer all your STEEM away. You should have plenty of time to recover your account before a total lost.
Lastly, let's see how it looks like after my power down of 1 STEEM.
In the transaction history, there is a record of "Start Power Down...". However, my STEEM POWER balance is not deducted yet. I can still be with the same level of power for a week. That is fair!
Conclusion
Only if you planned to quit steemit, power down is generally not a good idea. If the price of STEEM skyrocketed, you may not be able to sell in time. On the contrary, if there was a sharp fall of STEEM price, you may immediately buy STEEM to power up.
With that said, the design is to encourage people to buy and hold, theoretically! How the whales are dealing with this? I would recommend a further reading posted by 
Daily Steem Stats Report - @steemit is powering down (and up)
On steemit, the more you know, you will find the more you don't know!
Thank you for reading.
