I'm leaning against this; not because I think we need to hold on to people's stakes but because we have an inherent "structural" problem relating to how Steem is presented — and presents itself — to the world:
Everything here is always presented/marketed in terms of participating here in order to gain current income, rather than gaining from long term price appreciation. Well, if that's what we're telling people... then we're missing the mark on making long-term holding an attractive idea.
From reading all these comments, the closest to anything that makes sense is what @therealwolf offered... instead of penalizing people, or "locking up" their stakes, make it more attractive to commit to a long-term hold. Let's say (only an example) you hold for a year, you get the full inflation gain. Hold for 6 months, you get 75%. Hold for three months... you only get 50%. A month? 25%. And so forth... it's like any pension plan, medical savings plan, even investment plan... IT TAKES TIME TO VEST YOUR STAKE.
Psychology is important here... we may be talking about negligible amounts in terms of real money but people are very funny about "giving up" a higher guaranteed return... it's like losing something, and people hate to lose.
So, what I like the idea of is for your upvote/downvote power to be determined by both total steem staked and stake length. So if we made this change your Steem Power would no longer be 1:1 for STEEM powered up, but would also relate the the time-lock option you chose.
It would look like this:
5000 STEEM powered up for 4 weeks = $0.03 (100% upvote)
500 STEEM powered up for 40 weeks = $0.03 (100% upvote)
50 STEEM powered up for 400 weeks = $0.03 (100% upvote)
This would allow more equality in vote influence for people. The wealthy would have the advantage of being able to liquidate their Steem Power sooner, but the less economically well off would have the option to invest longer in the Steem blockchain for a more comparable vote strength to the wealthy person.
This would result in the concept that @therealwolf suggested, but it would also solve some of Steem's hierarchical unfairness built into the system that favors the wealthy over the poor/middle class.
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