Let's Talk - Investing And Power Up

Hello everyone and members of Steem Education community.

This is my entry on the contest, "Let's Talk What Do You Think - Investing And Power Up".

I would like to thank @harferri and the administrators for organizing this contest.

Power up or powering up on steemit as a lot of us are aware is converting your steem tokens into steem power to increase our influence here on steemit.

Every new registered user on the steemit network when successfully registered has a delegated steem power of 15 so that he or she is able to make posts, comments and upvotes.

This small amount of delegated steem power cannot be used to make unlimited posts because it is not enough.

To be able to make more posts on steemit, the new user would have to increase his or her steem power which can be done in a number of ways.

Just to be quite clear, steem power delegation is giving out some of your steem to another user in this case newbies carry out activities on steemit because they have part of other users steem power.

A lot of us usually think that when we power up, we no longer own that steem but it belongs to the network.

I particularly before getting to know more about steemit used to think powering up meant I was losing my steem.

So what is the importance of powering up;

• Power up helps to increase your influence on steemit.

I am sure most of us who registered for steemit were drawn in because it is a social media platform that allows us to earn from making posts unlike Facebook and other social media that just takes from us.

Due to this we often feel discouraged when we make posts and do not get the attention of curators. We must take note that we as users are also curators because we can upvote on posts and make people earn rewards.

But the only way to make sure that our votes carry heavy weights and give users up to and over $1 is by powering up.

Let's consider this, with my current effective steem power of about 850 steem, I can give a user at 50% vote although not much $0.01 but a user with a steem power of 20 would give $0.00. Considering this it is clear that people with more steem power have more influence because their votes carry heavy weights.

• Power up is a form of investing in steem.

Like already stated, when you power up, you still own your steem which means when you have a steem power of 1000, you have 1000 steem.

This steem can be seen as an investment because it means you are believing in steem and when the steem price increases, it would benefit you a lot because your steem power will increase and your vote would carry more weight.

The vote you give when steem price is at let's say $1 is more than you give when steem price is at $0.36.

• Power up helps steem price.

When we do more power ups, it means we are holding steem tokens. Steem is a cryptocurrency and as we know its price is affected by the number of people holding onto steem tokens.

When we have more people holding steem meaning they are not trading it for other coins, the price of steem increases or at least it doesn't fall significantly.

One way you can hold steem and help it's price increase is by powering up.

• Power up helps you to earn more curation rewards.

Curation rewards are what we are rewarded with from our upvoted posts. The more your steem power, the more curation rewards you get, So to earn from upvoting it is necessary to power up so that the heavy votes we give out can earn us heavy curation rewards.

To acquire more steem for power ups,

• You can keep posting on steemit and earning rewards. The SBD rewards can b converted into steem and some can be used for power ups.

• You can trade your other cryptocurrencies for steem. Another way of earning steem is to trade other cryptocurrencies like BTC, ETH and USDT for steem by spot trading on platforms like binance and huobi.

Because I have realized how important powering up is, I power up some of my earnings on a weekly basis. I started these weekly power ups about 7 weeks ago and I am in the 8th week of my power ups.

Since I started these power ups, my upvotes although not much, now give $0.01 which earns me more curation rewards unlike when I had 15 steem power.

Power ups aren't tedious at all but very fast and easy.

I haven't powered up for the week yet and so I would be showing how to power up for the sake of those who do not know how to do power ups.

To power up,

• You must first login to your wallet.

My steem power before power up is 852.218 steem

• Click on the drop down arrow for steem and click on power up.

• Enter the amount of steem you want to convert to steem power and click on power up. I want to power up 50 steem so I entered 50.

• Confirm details and click on ok.

• Enter private active key and click on sign in.

• Power up is done.

My new steem power is 902.256 steem

I hope this posts helps us t understand how beneficial powering up is.

This is a link to my Achievement 1 task.