Good day Steemians. Something is really bothering me and that is what will form the subject of my today's post. In the last two months (mainly since the event of the astronomical increase in the price of steem/SBD), a good number of mostly Steemians of less than 45 reputation score have been privately inquiring from me on the best way to sell their steem/SBD in order not to be shortchanged. The first thing I usually do after receiving such requests was to check out the inquirer's account wallet information. And if I found it to be holding less 100 steem power (SP), I would resort to outright discouragement.
In most cases, a good number of them would ditch the idea and would power up instead after hearing my sermon. While a few folks had taken offense and condemned me for withholding information from them. Ironically, some of those who castigated me and went on to sell their SBD still came to me afterwards to seek my opinion on their bandwidth issues.
I am a very liberal guy and likes to share what I have with friends and foes. I wouldn't want to be seen as someone who is being stingy with information. All I had done in the past is for your interest and the survival of the platform which most of us profess to love. Coming after this piece would be a series of articles in which I will describe various ways through which you can convert your earnings to fiat currencies.
My decision to first write on why you should not power down completely before revealing various authentic routes to covert your earnings into fiat currencies, is so that you understand the full implications of powering down completely before embarking on such self destructive action. With this, the decision will be all up to you to take. No one will have to contact me again; not even the Steemian noobs.
Reasons not to power down
Power down completely and lose your supporters
I am not saying people shouldn't power down at all but there is a big difference between powering down some hundreds to thousands of steem to take care of pressing personal problems and powering down completely. The emphasis here is on completely.
Honestly, I have not seen any one negative effect of powering down that's more than losing your entire supporters — those who always upvote your articles irrespective its quality. Your SP is your power; your clout; the representation of your power and influence within the community. When you lose it to zero holding, you lose respect among your supporters. People begin to see you as a greedy abuser of the reward pool, and an enemy of the platform. And you risk Isolation.
I will give you an example here. But I won't reveal the name of the person being referred to. There is a hard working steeam of 66 reputation score I used to follow his blog a lot about 3, 4 months ago. He was a master blogger then and even his thumbnail blog images alone could make a whale go for him. He was getting $100+ in payout per post and was having close to 4000SP. The images below are few evidence of what he was earning then per post.
All of a sudden, I stopped seeing his blog updates on my feeds. My investigation revealed he was powering down. Fast forward to 3 months later being last week, I opened my feed one day and saw his article in a very bad shape — about $0.8 after nearly 4hrs. I couldn't believe it. I checked out his wallet...lol and behold the reason lay bare there! He is having only 28SP! No wonder! Evidence of what he earns now and his current SP are below:
Perhaps, this dude thought that it was going to be business as usual. That he could always be making hundreds of dollars per article. Little wonder someone who used to update his blog at least 3 times in a day suddenly lost traction. And rarely updates his blog once in two days these days.
You are not helping steem value when you power down completely
Powering down hurts price of steem cryptocurrency because it would result in more steem being dumped on various exchanges. And you know what than mean by your knowledge of law of demand and supply — increase in supply leads to decrease in price. So more steem being dumped on various exchanges will derive down the value of steem when a significant number of people are taking this path.
Imagine what the price of steem cryptocurrency will be if all Steemians decides to not to power down for 2 years? Your guess is as good as mine.
You risk facing bandwidth issue
Yes! I totally forgot this with respect to my friend whom I told you his story, that prior to powering he used to update his blog at least three times but now rarely updates his blog in once in two days probably because he might have been having bandwidth issues. Presently, I learnt that when you power down fully, you risk being locked out of the account. I personally don't know why but further details on this can be found here
The future of steem is very bright
Power down and miss the goodies that would come with successful launching of Hard Fork 0.20.0 according to expert prediction. Easy onboarding of new accounts is one of the priorities of Hard Fork 0.20.0 which would remove the bottleneck being experienced in creating new accounts. This will lead to astronomical increase in the number of new entrants and also increased demands for steem cryptocurrency. With this, price of steem will certainly go to moon. Today total number of participants is not yet 1 million and steem price has gotten to $10 all time high before. And SBD once breaking through $20 resistance price line. You can only image what price of steem would be when we have over 500 million active accounts.
Honesty, future of steem cryptocurrency is too bright for anyone to ever miss the goodies of tomorrow through powering down fully. As a community builder and strong believer in steem cryptocurrency, I have done my bit in exposing the disadvantages of powering down your precious SP fully. I will also reveal how you can convert your earnings to fiat currencies in my future articles so that you and only you alone takes decision on what to do and what not to do. God bless you.
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