Warn about fully powering down disabling an account

[pfunks]

I've been seeing an issue come up lately now that we're 13 weeks past December 6th. People power down their accounts' full amount of STEEM and then are unable to transact. This is taking people by surprise and it does seem unintuitive especially without any warning of the potential for this happening. It takes manual intervention from another account to power the accounts up so they can transact again.

I'm not sure what would be the best way of tackling the issue, but the minimum solution would be a warning about it in the power down transaction dialog.

[roadscape]

I presume this only affects inactive accounts, as even a few cents of rewards would be enough to transact. Rather than a warning, we could just subtract e.g. 0.0001 VESTS from withdraw amount, or just write a bot that tops off accounts with a fraction of STEEM when they reach this condition.

[roadscape]

There's currently only 35 accounts with no vests and a value of more than $1, so the ideal approach would be a bot rather than tweaking withdraw amounts or adding more warnings to the UI.

[abitmore]

Check how many accounts have to_withdraw - withdrawn == vesting_shares.

[roadscape]

656 accounts, ignoring ones with less than 10 STEEM and 1 SBD.

[pfunks]

It's an issue, and due to the nature of power downs being an unadjustable 100% on steemit.com, it won't stop being an issue.

And these are just the people who seek help on chat, and copied the error message. This is an issue that could hurt user retention and possibly make people get confused and think they got banned or something.

One potential solution is to dynamically adjust the vesting amount when powering down to leave 5-10 SP in an account. This might be more than the sliver of VESTS roadscape mentioned, but it may be good to leave some long-term headroom assuming overall transaction growth. If someone with an established following decides to take a break and power down, but then comes back and can't transact, we may lose a valuable contributor.

To match expected behavior from basically any other website, accounts should be allowed to remain able to transact (including posting and voting). And if you think about it, they need to be able to transact to send that final STEEM away from the account, assuming they wish to mostly cash out.

[FedericoPistono]

I had this very issue. 26,000+ STEEM powered down, wasn't able to do anything. No posting, no voting, no transferring, nothing.

Huge bummer.

[pfunks]

@FedericoPistono is a perfect example of what I talked about above. What if he didn't come into steemit.chat and ask for help? He might assume the whole thing was a scam and be turned off the platform forever. I can't imagine this would take a huge amount of work to implement a solution here. It would be as simple as subtracting 15000 or 20000 VESTS from the powerdown total.

[sneak]

@pfunks cryptocurrencies have risk, especially technical risk. simply being not a scam is sufficient for us—as pointed out above this isn't an issue affecting very many people. I fielded a support question about this recently too, it was no biggie.

We have some planned changes to the blockchain that will probably permit a tiny amount of bandwidth to accounts even with 0SP. It's on our radar.

Regardless, this isn't a condenser bug or feature request, so I'm closing this.

[pfunks]

It's a bug if people can't use the website due to insufficient implentation of the power down feature, with a fix being not technically complicated at all.

Saying "cryptocurrencies have risk" is a cop out. The goal of Steem is to make a blockchain user-friendly with a familiar, web or web-like interface, the reference standard being Condenser/steemit.com. That means accounts can't suddenly stop working for technical reasons any normal person shouldn't be expected to understand.