RE: Keeping Steem and SBD Under Your Mattress
There is an intrinsic optionality to holding liquid funds. Optionality means that you have choices about what to do with the money. Trading movements between SBD and STEEM, conversions, vote-buying, drugwars, gambling games, steemmonsters cards, SBI sponsoring, powering up, and probably lots of other choices I don't know about. Each of these have pros and cons and unique value that makes their relative advantages and profitability constantly shift. Optionality lets you continually incorporate new information, revisit your strategies, and flexibly shift between them.
Once you power up, your choices become much more limited. If you don't have a plan for how to get value from powered up SP (delegation, active curation for network, passive curation through a trail in exchange for votes from that trail, self voting, vote swapping with existing programs that include that in their design) then keeping your funds liquid until you do could actually be more valuable.
On the other hand, most newer Steemians do not have the level of blockchain knowledge they would need to fully benefit from the described optionality, and could be better off powering up.
Yes, you're right and I agree with you but to do what you've listed here, you have to know your way around. These users I was talking about are not even minnow, and I think the best solution would be to power up and era more, then they can do all that you've said.
Some of them could double or even triple their VP by power up.
Anyway, that's up to them, no one can tell them what to do, we advise people but the final decision is theirs.