13 weeks lockup is way too risky for an exchange to stake customer's fund to influence a single network in a market as volatile as crypto.
Wanting liquid STEEM having the same influence as the ones staked for long is not a good idea. Look at EOS, 3 days is way too short, liquid is suicide.
13 weeks lockup is way too risky for an exchange to stake customer's fund to influence a single network in a market as volatile as crypto
I don't agree with this. Exchanges could keep a modest percentage liquid to handle withdraws and start a power down if the liquid pool runs low. In the event that the liquid pool is exhausted they can disable withdraws temporarily and/or, if there is a mature lending market, borrow liquid STEEM to make payouts and then repay the loan from the power down. More likely is just disabling withdraws, which they already do (sometimes for months or even years).
I think the main reason they don't do it is simply the low value of STEEM and the extra work it would take to implement. The payoff isn't there, but it would be at a (sustained) higher price.
Some exchanges already do staking with no loss of liquidity to the customer on coins with a few weeks of unstake time. And that's a few weeks to get any coins unstaked, not one week to get a portion as with Steem.
So it's better to have custom stake period with governance influence scaling with said period, right? Exchanges being a factor is why I am leaning more to forcing the entity to determine how long they wish to commit before they stake as opposed to let them mature as long as the tokens are still staked. For example, if an exchange wants 2-year-stake-influence they need to determine upfront if they will never need the tokens for 2 years and get punished if they actually will need it compared to just stake and if they actually don't need the tokens they gain massive influence or if not they can unstake with no consequence.
I can't say what is better. But if people want to keep exchanges from voting, I don't think the existing 13 weeks (avg 7 weeks) will ultimately do that. Maybe a much longer period would work. Maybe nothing would work and you have to accept that whoever holds the keys gets to vote, ultimately.
Being forced to disable withdrawal and/or to take loan already kind of working as a consequence in my opinion. Is that severe enough to achieve better governance? I don't know.
That aside, a way more interesting "topic" is up for discussion now. Let's see where it develops.
Even that would only ever happen if they burned through their liquid slice and didn't replenish it fast enough from the initial power down installments, which is actually quite unlikely.
It is possible to get this information historically from the Steem blockchain since most of the exchange balances are public. For the most part they have only ever increased, meaning there would never have been a liquidity shortage with even a tiny liquid portion.
Is there any other known exchange currently voting for witnesses on Steem aside from @blocktrades?
I don't think so but I'm not 100% sure. In my opinion, mostly they ignore it because the value is low (and we're lucky when they keep their wallet updated and online), but now that they all have people whose job it is to figure out how to earn income with customer deposits, a rise in value would change the situation.
What are the coins you mention that has few weeks unstake time? I believe your statement is true. I just want to know what other coins has long stake periods.
Tezos has 2 weeks. Cosmos has 3 weeks. There are many others of course but those are the big ones I know about.
Decred has 28 days and here is another exchange offering staking without any lock up. They do disclose that there will be a withdrawal queue and you may have to wait to withdraw, so we will have to see how it works out, but I would be surprised if there were ever a long waiting period on the queue (if any at all), and certainly not 28 days.
https://www.kucoin.com/news/en-decred-soft-staking-official-rules
Thank you for taking time to bring these to me.
"Staking" on exchanges really strikes me as legacy financial system with crypto mask.
That aside, we can also see this as the customer "delegating" their stake to exchanges in the first place. "Not your keys, not your coins".