While it is often said that it takes two years to power down, in a previous post, it was shown that we can never get our Steem Power down to zero.
In this post I am going to look at the question of how much value we can actually get out, if/when we decide to power down and divest from Steem.
I ran a simulation with the following assumptions:
With inflation at 100%, and 90% of that compensated to Steem Power holder via interest payments, I refer to the difference as uncompensated inflation. That uncompensated inflation is used to pay those who curate and author. As we do not curate or author in this simulation, we do not get any of that.
Starting with 1000 Steem Power (worth around $400 at this time) we can power down 9.61 Steem after the first week, but gain 12.42 new Steem Power from interest. We now have 1002.80 Steem Power. In Dollar terms, Steem lost some value due to inflation (and the market cap staying constant in our simulation), our steem power is now worth $395.74. We have extracted $3.79 worth of Steem the first week. We also lost 47 cents to uncompensated inflation.
After the advertised 104 weeks (2 years), our remaining Steem Power is worth $131 and we have managed to power down a total of $239 worth of Steem. That represents nearly 60% of our original investment value, while nearly 33% is still stuck in Steem Power. The rest is lost to uncompensated inflation.
It is only after 216 weeks that the value of our remaining Steem Power drops below 10% of our original investment (below $40 in our simulation). That is more than 4 years! At that time we will have withdrawn 80% of our original investment, and 10% will have evaporated due to uncompensated inflation.
In the table below, we can also see that it will take 280 weeks to get below 5% ($20) and 431 weeks go below 1% ($4) of our original investment. At that time we will only have extracted 88% ($352) of our original $400 investment.
| Week | Remaining Steem Power | Powered Down | Interest | Remaining SP in USD | Extracted in USD | Total Extracted in USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1000.000000 | -0.000000 | +0.000000 | 400.000000 | -0.000000 | 0.000000 |
| 1 | 1002.804453 | -9.615385 | +12.419837 | 395.739132 | -3.794542 | 3.794542 |
| 2 | 1005.616771 | -9.642351 | +12.454668 | 391.523651 | -3.754122 | 7.548665 |
| 3 | 1008.436975 | -9.669392 | +12.489597 | 387.353074 | -3.714133 | 11.262797 |
| 26 | 1075.530168 | -10.312715 | +13.320553 | 302.784840 | -2.903251 | 86.575556 |
| 52 | 1156.765143 | -11.091636 | +14.326657 | 229.196648 | -2.197651 | 152.109970 |
| 104 | 1338.105596 | -12.830418 | +16.572577 | 131.327758 | -1.259235 | 239.267708 |
| 151 | 1526.350635 | -14.635404 | +18.904011 | 79.388898 | -0.761220 | 285.522178 |
| 216 | 1831.094691 | -17.557441 | +22.678298 | 39.577204 | -0.379486 | 320.976725 |
| 280 | 2190.539261 | -21.003973 | +27.130057 | 19.942585 | -0.191219 | 338.462456 |
| 431 | 3343.530991 | -32.059427 | +41.409979 | 3.958050 | -0.037952 | 352.697581 |
It is clear that we can never power down all our Steem, but at some distant point in the future the remaining value will become insignificant.
If we continue to curate and author, we can compensate (at least partially) for the uncompensated inflation, but that will not speed up the powering down process. It is important to note that that is a reward for work and effort, not a recuperation of our investment (although the investment helps to reward curation work).
If we do want to get the most out of our investment as possible, but don't want to spend the time authoring and curating, it stands to reason that we should set up a voting bot, or delegate voting to a good curator, during the entire powering down phase.
Two years would already be a very long time to exit from an investment, but as we see, it takes much longer than that to fully divest.
I have suggested we introduce a minimum power down allowance, which would allow smaller investors to divest in a more reasonable amount of time. I believe that it would encourage more small investors to invest in Steem Power if their investment were not going to be stuck in Steem Power for half a decade.
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