To be fair ..holding SP doesn't directly answer the problem of evergreen content , even in your example , if you keep holding the SP and earned more upvotes ( past 7 days) you could accrue and hold more SP.
Holding SP is the right thing to do but isn't necessarily the answer to evergreen content.
so I dropped some Pockets on him instead.
What is this black magic ?
Pockets were issued a while ago. It's a sidechain/alternate currency invented by user @biophil.
Resteeming the genesis post (during the payout window) gave each steemster 1,000,000 Pockets.
There was a market for them for a while, but I haven't seen them used much since.
Last price I recall was $2 for 100,000 Pockets.
They're not printing any more though, so they'll get rarer over time.