There is a lot of uncertainty around the curation reward. In short, 25% of a posts rewards are divided up among curators at payout, with curators who voted early receiving a larger portion, and the total receive weighted by each curator's Steem Power. This is all done in a non-transparent way.
My goal is to simplify the expected earnings consistent curators will receive, based on the curation bonus's they've gotten over the previous week. To help determine how much Powering Up will help a particular curator, I've build a webapp that estimates the effect of a change in Steem Power balance, available here: https://steemit-estimator.herokuapp.com/ (For more instructions you can see my announcement at steem.com/@geoffrey).
Am I ready to commit to Curation?
In order to determine if you really can retire based just on your earnings, it's fairly straight-forward to determine what those earnings will be after a large power up (or power down if you wish). Just enter your username, and an amount of Steem Power you intend to hold, and hit the 'calculate' button.
If your goal is to retire with a set daily earnings, let's say $100 a day from curation rewards, then try increasing the amount of Steem Power you will hold until you hit that number. In my case, while holding ~1802 Steem Power, I earn 78 cents a day in rewards. I would need roughly 22,000 Steem Power to be achieve the earnings in this example. What that means is I would have to go on an exchange, and purchase 20,198 Steem, and power all of it up, in order to reach those target earnings. At current prices, that's a little over $48,000, which is an unrealistic amount for me, unfortunately. Your situation may be better, maybe you are gifted at picking winners with your votes. Or maybe you've earned a rather large author reward for a few posts, and need a much smaller increment of Steem Power to reach your target earnings.
So that's it, just Power Up and I'm set for life?
Keep in mind the assumptions listed in the announcement, and that Steem Power becomes diluted every day at a large (but decreasing over the next few years) rate. Those of us who are mostly Powered Up are shielded from this, but if you're holding strictly Steem, you are losing a larger share of the Steem pie as time goes by, with people constantly powering down.
Sounds great, sign me up!
Okay, just buy yourself as much Steem as you need on one of the exchanges, and power it up! Everybody who does this is helping the network in a multitude of ways, not least of which is taking Steem off of the market, thereby raising the price through added scarcity. I personally thank you for that!
Just bear in mind, you will be receiving weekly payments for 2 years when you need to cash out . My advice is to acquire as much Steem as you need now, as long as it reasonably fits in your budget, and wait a month or two before you start powering down enough of your gains to not affect your total "retirement plan". Of course, with the 2 year payout, you have to believe Steemit will remain stable, or grow, in the long term. I firmly believe this is the case, and have bought more than half of the Steem currently in my wallet.
