Earlier this week, I read a post about how someone purchased some Steem in order to power up. This had me thinking about doing the same thing. Before I did this though, I wanted to get an idea of how much this purchase would effect the value of my upvotes. After going through a number of accounts and pulling current Steem Power balances along with current vote values, I've generated the following graph.
The curve is linear with a slope of 0.00005. The following two graphs show the the curve zoomed in at the lower end of the curve. Based on what I found, it requires a little less than 200 Steem Power before your votes are able to change the payout counter for any content.
At the bottom end, a brand new minnow has a voting power of about 0.0001. At the top end of the spectrum, ned has a vote value of about $194, with 3.7 million Steem Power.
Based on what I've found, it doesn't seem to be cost effective for me to buy Steem and then power up. The effect on my vote is fairly minimal, unless I buy almost $200 worth. At some point I may do it, but right now I don't have $200 free to spend on something like this.
Charts were generated using data provided by steemdollar.com and steemwhales.com.