If you believe price is set by supply and demand, taking away 50% of supply should drive up price, assuming demand is constant.
You can see who is in the process of powering down, getting ready to cash out, by looking at steemwhales.com
Look for the piggybank symbol to see who is powering down.
Dan was doing some powering down recently. Made me nervous. But to be fair everyone has to pay rent.
STEEM On!!
Good point. I suppose they are making steem more scarce, and that should make SBD more valuable. However, the disappearance of so much SBD could potentially raise liquidity and stability concerns. It's worth noting that the SBD market cap is less than 1% of most large cryptocurrencies, which makes its ties to STEEM the only thing keeping it from being a penny stock such as Musicoin or Unobtanium.