Yes, this is it in a nut shell. But what I think many people are missing is that the whales are not against limiting their rewards if Steem will benefit. The 'unless' does not necessarily need to represent the financial loss in curation.
If we could come up with something and implement a cap, then experience huge growth in minnows, it might become too expensive to become a present day whale. So if the original whales are happy.....we have the basis for the entire platform to be dropped down a level in terms of the numbers able to have, reach and use influence. We are potentially running out of time to implement such a thing.
What do the whales need beside consensus?
Stake - they will get bigger returns from a successful steem than anything else.
Reputation - such a position in the steem community that could become a global community.
Prestige - no single act than rejecting further voting influence could help steem more.
Philanthropy - an act of sacrifice in a weary world.
Reward - minimum of inflation protection.
Is there anything else? Is any of that meaningful? It is to me but then, I am an idealist in many ways and I'm not a whale :)
This is a generalization. Some whales are against that. Might that make them kind of jerks, yes. Yet we cannot control or stop that.
Whales are people too so they will come in all kinds of people. :)
I accept that completely.....but what if almost all were up for it and they were able to show their support? What if terms could be reached that made everyone happy? I understand that people are different and perspectives are different.....but I would have thought that the one thing we can all agree upon is that extreme influence harms Steem as a whole and it is wide adoption that makes a success for everyone. I just feel that a solution is there if we make the effort to reach it.
Oh, and I too believe there is a solution.
Yet jumping at what appears to be the solution in the short term I think is likely to bite us in the ass.
If we can come up with a compelling reason someone would want to have power beyond the voting cap, where they still get liquid currency then I believe that could transform this into a more long term solution.
All I can think of for the future is for account verification processes to limit the number of accounts a person can control and/or have levels of what an account can do with/without verification. I well appreciate how difficult it is to implement a water-tight account verification process and also, we'd need to do something interesting to enable privacy to be possible.
That'd be pretty cool. Yet there is no guarantee of a bad actor buying in and then blowing up the idea.
I am fine with the concept, but if we can think of a compelling reason for someone to want to be a whale at that point or above that cap then that would be a good reason.
For the good of steem/it/busy, etc. is one thing?
Yet often they still want money. It could be argued their stake is gaining value, but if they are not voting then they likely are not earning anything liquid, and they cannot actually spend their money without powering down.
As to convincing them... I've monitored some of their activities for months and seen various investigations. Some of them are clearly in it for the money and don't give a big damn about the community as much as being able to use their power how they see fit.
Capping the power will likely not fix the problem in the long run. It leaves itself open to gaming, and in a sense if they do game the system which I fully expect some of them would (because, they do now, and they've been talked to about it and indicated they don't give a damn what anyone else thinks), then it actually could be worse. Right now we can identify them as one account.
Once they have their power disseminated across 50 accounts controlled by a simple program (not difficult to make) then it could be trickier to identify who they actually are. They could then even shell game it.
I see this as looking at the problem with short term vision, and ignoring the long term ramifications.
If we can think of it , we need a compelling reason for them to want an amount of power beyond the cap. If they cannot vote, then they cannot earn curation rewards, which is their liquid income, and there is no benefit.
This is reality. Not everyone gives a damn about the GOOD of the community, or other people. Some of them may speak of the good of the community when it is positive PR for them, but watch their actions and there are some that don't seem to actually care much about that.
I wrote a post perhaps just for brainstorming how we might be able to make such accounts beyond a certain steem power compelling, as there are more problems with the voting cap than the current situation. Yet I cover that in the post.
As I said... I do think we can find a solution, but I do believe that solution should involve making such an account attractive rather than effectively penalizing them for gaining power beyond a certain amount.
Over time more and more people would cross that line simply by using the platform.
Great, thanks dwinblood! I have too. I'll check yours out....it will probably be better than mine :)
It's not better than yours. It is just different... yours asked what the effect would be. Mine is more focused on trying to solve some potential problems that could come with it. I don't know a solution, so more a post to solicit ideas and get people thinking about some of the problems.
Just kidding :) I absolutely love it. Having some more engagement is all I wanted. I'm not foolish enough to think that these ideas have not already been discussed elsewhere but perhaps there wasn't the perception of support or enough people involved. Either way, at least we can say we all tried.