When I was visiting the Anarchapulco event in Mexico I had barely any time to spend on Steemit for more than two weeks. Being a dolphin stake holder in Steem Power that would have created huge opportunity costs for me as I was not able to upvote posts and comments and use my daily voting power appropriately. Luckily I found a solution that handled this perfectly for me: SmartSteem!
Sell Your Voting Power
The key feature of SmartSteem is the ability to sell your voting power exactly at a certain threshold to other users of Smartsteem for SBD or Steem. As you probably know we all have a voting power that regenerates 20% every single day. As soon as you hit 100% voting power you start to have opportunity costs as you don't earn any curation rewards and you cannot gather any more voting power either. By allowing Smartsteem to sell off your votes at a high threshold like for example 98% you can keep a perfect equilibrium while never loose any money.
The Steem and SBD you earn are stored in your SmartSteem account and can be send to any account you like. You can also automize the payout to your account if you don't want to manually transfer your funds. There is even a SmartSteem whitelist and personal whitelist for people who may use your voting power. Pretty smart, isn't it?
Buy Upvotes, Boost Your Posts & Make A Profit
Of course you can use SmartSteem as well the other way around: By sending any amount of SBD or Steem to you will get upvotes from several users who are selling their votes via SmartSteem. You will receive a 2x - 2.5x upvote of the value of your transaction, depending on the current curation reward. For posts done on Steemit or Busy that means you basically always make a small profit - unlike all bid-bots where you can loose quite a bit and it is always a gamble.
Only when you are posting on platforms like DTube or Utopian where you share part of the author rewards with the platform itself you will not make a profit. It will still be a great promotion tool afterall. SmartSteem also offers the bid-bot for which you can delegate some SteemPower and earn 95% of what the bot generates. However, this post is not about that feature. Finally, you can use an affiliate link that will give you a little bit of all transactions the referral will ever do. My personal link looks like that: https://smartsteem.com?r=flauwy.
Conclusion
I think that selling all of your voting power is not a good idea and will not be beneficial for Steem and its mass-market adoption. However, in situations where you face opportunity costs for not being able to upvote posts yourself SmartSteem will safe the day. This can have any kind of reason like holidays, no internet connection, lot's of work, family life and so. I think it is great to set up a high threshold and make sure your Steem Power is always in use and never sits idle in your account ever again.
Let me know what you think about SmartSteem, if you already use it and what your opinion about this service is.