(Edit: I did not know how "powering down" works. I just assumed if you power down, you can choose to power down on a small portion of your total SP... I now learned this is not the case. If you choose to "power down", it gives you the only option to get %1 of your steem power in liquid steem, till you stop powering down. It now makes sense, and I don't think there is any reason to panic. I falsely interpreted the whales powering down as a disbelief in long term viability of steemit.)
I was just browsing, the tools around the steemtools.com, and saw steemdown.com.
When I looked at the steemdown.com, I saw the fact that most of the whales are powering down as fast as they can.
See screenshot:
(Or you could just go to the site http://steemdown.com and see)
I'm looking at the stats for @steemit, @blocktrades, @jamesc, @berniesanders, @smooth, @dantheman, @itsascam, @rainman, @michael-a, @summon, @cloop1, @pharesim, @steempty, @wang and more...
All those are powering down %100 (or close to it, %90+) of their steem power.
But, as whales, if these guys had long term faith in steem, say, they believed, in the next 5-10 years, they would replace facebook, reddit, twitter, youtube, and their steem value will go up multiple fold, wouldn't it make more sense to keep that steem power?
This worries me. Was this all a scam, a pump-and-dump? (it is ironic that one of the whales is named @itsascam )
(I have not put money in myself, but I was excited about long term potential of a censorship free social media platform.)
Please comment and discuss.