To Devs: Why Restrict Steem Power Transfer? @dantheman
In this article I'll refer to Steem Power as Vests.
Quoting @sigmajin: "Vests represent a share of a large portion of Steem, held in reserve. and that is used to fund power down ".
This coincides with my understanding of Vest liquidation - and I understand that this reserve is funded uniquely with newly mined coins.
This means Vest disbursements are not reliant on external money.
Thus, Steem's economic model does not rely on the transfer of Vest ownership being impossible.
i.e. the unique transfer of Vest ownership, without an account sale
Vest liquidation to Steem could still be stretched over 104 weeks.
There is no economic advantage to preventing users from transferring a Vest ownership title.
These titles could indeed be traded.
But this would only have an effect on the currency used to trade it (probably btc).
So the effect on Steem would probably be fairly negligible.
Why remove users' choice over what they would like to do with their Vests?
Is this not unnecessarily undemocratic?
Can a user truly be said to own Vests when he cannot transfer ownership?
Sybil account risk
Non existent.
A title transfer would be recorded on the blockchain, so it'd be a trivial matter to track the source of the Sybil accounts - so that a Sybil that intends to be successful would simply purchase an account sufficiently-stocked with SP, which he can already do at present.
I still have so much to learn about cryptocurrency. I wouldn't have even thought to ask this kind of question about vests. I'm going to keep my eyes on this post just to see how the conversation goes. Thanks @satire .
You're welcome mate
If the person buying Vests bought them only to power them down, it would have an effect on the value of Steem. People will be watching the amount of vests powering down, and if it gets very high, they will short Steem because they predict it will fall, causing it to fall early. But if they bought them to use the accounts, it would have little impact on the economy.
In that case the powering down period can be made longer. Or there could be a hard cap on how much Vests you can liquidate.
That defeats the purpose of the power down functionality. Sort of "renegotiates" the deal. I wouldn't vote for a witness that tried to make that happen, and I don't think whales would either.
But the power down % and period, is already presumably set for economic stability. So if Vest transfers lead to excessive powering down, surely it would stand to reason to adjust power down % amount and/or period? Since the original reasoning was to create favourable economic conditions anyways?
Nobody wants the rules changed on them, when it affects them. That could cause people who weren't powering down before to start doing it, because they lost faith in the platform.
Not really. If there's a market for selling Vest titles, the fastest exit for the majority of users will always be to sell titles.
Only whales may power down. But even then it wouldn't make much sense, if there's low confidence, provided there was sufficient liquidity in the Vest title exchange.
And as I said the effect of powering down on the wider economy can be mitigated.
Any system that is created praying and hoping users won't use a function is not well created.
And I do not believe freedom should be restricted when it's not necessary to maintain security. In this case it's not necessary to restrict Vest title transfers, and it takes away basic property rights.
From the Whitepaper
https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf
I would say that the non-transfarable charakteristic makes it save against possible cheatings. You can rely that the Steem Power will not vary too much within short term. Usually comments are payed out after a certain time frame. Being able to transfer Steem Power easily would let people send around steem power like crazy to avoid potential penalties.
Interesting point. Thanks
In my understanding, the most important reason for VESTS not being liquid is to make sure that VESTS holders have a long-term interest in the success of the platform. This is particularly important because the devs (aka whales) hold a significant portion of the total VESTS. You wouldn't want the devs to sell everything, grab the money and run, would you?
I wouldn't care unless it lead to a dump on the STEEM market, which it wouldn't if the market was uniquely for selling Vests titles.
This would just mean Vests change ownership and I'm rather agnostic in regards to who owns it.
Each new Vest owner would have an interest in the success of the platform, which may sum to the same interest as an individual with a single long-term interest.