Nice logical approach here, I can really see the argument for getting rid of SBDs now that we've functioned without them for so long. Might be a bit of a shock to short term Steem price converting them all though.
While I like your thinking behind the automatic 'powering up without powering up' option as it's simple, I don't think it's necessary - I think maybe changing the terms like @therealwolf and others have suggested to 'staking' makes more sense, but I don't really conceive of staked steem (let's start calling it that!) as a different type of token to liquid steem.
But the idea of fewer tokens/ less complexity is definitely something that I think would help popularise Steem.
I guess communities can make things as complex as they like!
I guess I'm already biased due to my years on Steem, but I like the term
Steempower. However, it does create overhead and unneeded complexity.Many crypto people are already familiar with the term
staking. And it would be easier for outside people looking into Steem to understand thatSteempoweris just referring to the token in a staked state.Besides that, I also don't think it makes much sense to keep VESTS around. Steem Engine made the correct move, by creating a single token, with different states (staked, delegated, idle).
Personally, I'm very much in favor of simplifying things!
My only concern is backwards compatibility in regards to SMTs. Or in other words: we have to make sure that SMTs created before these potential changes, are not getting deprecated by it. But that's something @vandeberg most likely is able to answer.
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I don't think it would require much rework in terms of SMTs, because it could simply be started with 13 weeks matured liquid STEEM turns into vesting_shares. Example, I choose in post was 30 days but could very well be 13 weeks.
Every time I here VESTs talked about I just get this picture of Dan Larimer and other math fans with satisfied grins on their faces.
Great for mathemeticians, nonsense to the other 99.9% of the population.
I take your point about knock on effects of changing anything!
For me this is a clear user interface problem. The general user shouldn't have to care about vests, or whether steempower and staked steem are different. Just display these things the right way in their wallets and no one will care and there are no issues with compatibility either.
VESTS is there so rewarding SP via inflation can be done with a single change of value instead of adding differing values to ALL accounts that has SP according to the amount of SP on each account. I'm sure you are aware how it works.
If you want to abolish VESTS, do you have an alternative in mind that at least as efficient? Or do you also want to abolish rewarding SP via inflation altogether?
I believe regular users never need to care about VESTS anyway, the same way they never need to care about rshares. I believe VESTS is worth keeping.