Being an active part of the steemit.com community means you will be earning Steem Power and Steem Dollars for successful posts and Steem Power for your voting of other good stories. This essentially increases your influence thanks to the further increase of the Steem Power you are holding as well as allows you to easily cash out by selling the accumulated Steem Dollars.
But the accumulated Steem Power can also be turned out to regular STEEM tokens via a process called Powering Down. This part however is not very well explained and can be confusing for new users and probably even more advanced ones are not completely aware of how that actually works if they have not yet tried it themselves to discover it by experience.
The explanation is that when you Power Down your Steem Power says that it will require 2 years and 104 payments to convert back to STEEM tokens, but how exactly this works is not explained very well.
What the above actually means is that once you initiate a Power Down you will start receiving 1/104th of your Steem Power in the form of STEEM tokens each week until you have withdrawn all of your tokens or you manually cancel the power down process, so you can actually withdraw STEEM, but it is a slow process and is divided in small parts.
To initiate a Power Down of your existing STEEM POWER you need to go to your steemit.com Profile page and navigate to the Wallet section.
Click on the STEEM tokens on the right of your STEEM POWER balance and select the option Power Down.
You may be required to relogin as a means of confirmation to initiate the action.
At any time you decide you want to stop the Power Down you can click there again and just select the Cancel Power Down option that will appear.
Here is an example of how things should work, let us say you have 104 STEEM tokens in the form of Steem Power and you initiate a Power Down. In exactly 1 week you should receive the first of the 104 payments that should be 1 STEEM, after another week you will receive 1 more token and so on every week for the next 2 years.
You can of course cancel the Power Down the same way you have enabled it and can restart the process again at any time you wish to. If you cancel it before even 1 week passes, then you will not receive anything, if you cancel it after 1 week and you have received STEEM token(s) you can keep them even if you cancel the power down. If you restart the Power Down a any time it will start from the beginning, dividing your current Steem Power balance to 104 equal payments and executing one each week.
If you manage to accumulate a lot of STEEM POWER thanks to being a great steemit.com content contributor thank with the help of the Power Down option you will be able to convert some of that power to STEEM tokens that you can transfer to other users or sell on a crypto exchange etc. Transferring all of your STEEM POWER at once is however not possible at this moment, probably as a safeguard set in place to sustain the steemit ecosystem long term.