What are some practical things we could do now, to reverse the price trend, and allow people to save in Steem and sleep well at night?
Reduce power down period to one week . This should be in hard fork 17 imo. The sooner the better
The faster steem is tranfered from weak to strong hands the faster the price can start to go back up. Sure the price might go down to 1 cent but that's exactly what we want so people can sell their share for pennies and get out fast.
Locking people's coin for 3 months doesn't prevent people from selling, it just slows down the price discovery process. This feature looks scammy from the outside, people don't like being locked they want control over their money. You are not going to get any investment from people if you remove them ability to withdraw their fund at any time.
The lack of liquidity is also a killer for speculators and also the uncertainity coming from constantly moving liquid supply.
edit: the best solution would be to remove steem power and let steem be votable after 7 days held in an account
it would remove complexity created by having steem power ( power up/down, coins locked,etc..)
I think you have a very good point here.
I think maybe the rationale for 3 months is as a form of safety mechanism, if there is a sheep-mentality event (ie. everyone panics), the damage is contained, and there is time for people to cool-off.
Also, it may be to prevent people from voting multiple times with transferred stake. If with a 30 day payout period 3 months was necessary, surely with HF17 and 7 day payout the power down time should come down to 3 weeks. I agree with @snowflake, a lock-in period of any kind is bad PR.
None of the top cryptocurrencies have any lock-in, yet they are successful and relatively a lot more stable than Steem.
The main rationale is to prevent multiple voting attacks (vote, transfer coins to another account, vote again). If somehow the voting issues are separated from the currency issues (or the voting issues addressed another way) there isn't a need for it.
The proposal to have one 7-day voting period (instead of the current 24 hours + 30 days) cmeans power down could be reduced, probably to about 3 weeks, without being any more vulnerable to multiple voting.
1 week and 1 minute would be enough to prevent double voting if voting period is 1 week.
Why 3 weeks?
[Nesting limit] I totally agree - that makes a lot of sense. I had written about eliminating Steem Power and just having Steem a long time ago. Waiting one week before it counts as influence is an elegant enough solution. That'll do away with any lock-in period, make the system much simpler and more accessible to users and open up the currency to investors.
Good to hear man! I agree it would be a more elegant solution. Hopefully we can get the devs on board :)
assuming the payout is exactly 7 days then yes. i assume it would have the usual extended period as now so you can't snipe vote at the very end. that means someone who votes and then initiates a power down would get their first 1/3 before the post is over, allowing a partial double vote, which is the same as now.
I see what you mean, you want 3 weeks so someone is only able to partially double vote right? 1 week would allow someone to double vote with all stake..
I think it would be best to completely remove steem power and allow users to vote with steem that has been in their wallet for more than 7days.
Say I have 100 steem in my wallet and I just sent myself an extra 50 steem , my upvote would be worth 100 steem until 11th of march ( 1 week from now) , after 11th my vote would be worth 150 steem.
if I vote for something with 100 steem then decide to send those 100 steem to another account to upvote the same content, the other account will have to wait 1 week for the 100 steem to be included in the upvote, so it would be too late to upvote for the same content. This design seem like it would be more secure and not interfere with user experience, also would remove complexity of having 3 currencies.
I could start a power down with account @david on Sunday, make a post on Tuesday, upvote it on Wednesday, get my SP liquidated to Steem on Sunday. Power up the Steem to @goliath, vote on second Monday. The payout happens on second Tuesday, with effectively two votes for the same SP holding.
That said, this could be probably be prevented by disabling voting for the stake powering down. So if you power down 75% of your SP holding, it'll all be liquidated in one week, but for that week you would only be voting with the remaining 25% of your SP.
The idea of disabling voting on powering down stake was previously brought up, but the problem is due to the long drawn schedule it never made sense. However, if someone wants to liquidate their SP holding anyway, I don't think anyone would mind not voting for 1 week.
[Edit - snowflake has a better solution. Just do away with Steem Power, and let Steem be votable after 7 days held in an account]
Doesn't the SP delegation feature have something similar, the reverse way? I.e. when a delegation is canceled, it'll be one week before the delegator can vote again.
I'd definitely like to see this implemented. A 1 week power down period sounds much better.
Check my answer to smooth above. A system where steem power is removed and where only the steem that has been in an account for 1 week can upvote would also solve the problem you mentionned.
This is anti free market. In such event you need to let the market play out, risky periods is actually when traders make the most money.
The 3 months lock period is an unnecessary barrier to entry. It prevents a lot of people from investing and playing the curation game. Nobody want their money locked, even a week is too long but it is required to prevent double voting. A week is enough to contain damage anyway, you don't need 3 months for that.
I was just trying to play devils advocate. I think the arguments you've laid out for 1 week are very appealing, I would love to hear @dantheman's take on it.
At that point one might ask what the purpose is of having a power down period at all? Perhaps it would be better to just allow people to vote according to the weight of the liquid Steem in their account?
You need a locking period to prevent someone from transfering his stake to another account and vote multiple times on the same stuff.
But you make a great point, and I have been discussing this with the busy team recently and they also seem to agree that SP could be removed too and that 3 currencies is confusing for people but we would need a mecanism to prevent double voting with liquid steem.
Of course and I think it was mentioned in the white paper too. Not sure what other mechanism could do that though.
@fabien said something like, if the payout period is 7 days then only the steem that has been in the wallet for more than 7days can upvote. I havn't thought about all the details but i think it could work.
I will need to think about it but it might.
Someone who wants to get out quickly could just sell his account.
Should we draw any conclusions from bitshares with is now at a third of a cent? How low can it go?