I briefly read the SMT whitepaper and listened to video done by Jerry Banfield. It got my attention for its immediate liquidity like the bancor protocol and I love the bancor project. People said steem now become the bancor of community and its awesome. However one thing that I am worried was if that would discourage people from powering up.
I bought steem for quite a while and I converted them all to SP right away because it seemed to me that the only use of steem was just to power up to get better reward from commenting and upvoting. Now with the SMT, the demand for Steem will certainly increase because they are needed to fund the ICO. However all of my Steem has already been locked up and I wouldn't be able to participate into the ICO if I want to. I understand the conversion of Steem to SP is 1:1 but it will take 2 years to completely convert back to steem.
I didn't read through the whitepaper so I would appreciate if someone can answer me the advantages for powering up apart from having higher reward and higher interest rate