Well, stake holders aren't currently leading the price action of STEEM or SBD. They've done so in the past pre-Upbit and haven't been able to get it over a dollar for most of the coins' histories.
I don't think they have to do any sort of 1933 confiscation to anyone in the west, once they've gathered enough data on people trading crypto and once the fiat situation gets bad enough they can always just pull the plug on tether and all usdt-trading exchanges in overnight raids.
There doesn't have to be a grand conspiracy, although there are accusations of pay 2 win as far as voting goes, freedom is probably another story all on its own. Self-interested parties, colluding or not, arrive at similar conclusions when it comes to protecting wealth.
It's fortunate for us then that most other social media crypto plays have hesitation about the longevity of crypto's elevated prices, this means that their attempts are also greedy, with them front-loading their profit-making and making things transparently bad for the end user in terms of possible equity shares they can get and how useful they ultimately are.
Which is why I agree with the nature of your original post, because STEEM could change, but that would require the entire SP distribution and lots of the witness's complacency to change. And if a player enters the field and is equipped with the right team and mindset from the start and is willing to forgo those sweet, sweet ICO moneys in return for more support from a broader audience base and a more involved, active community led by existing popular personalities on the internet then we'd really be dead in the water.
(to change)
How so? There is the problem with all the "wealth distribution" schemes I've ever seen. It just sounds to me like jealousy and theft. If SP distributes voluntarily, sweet. Other than that, what right do any of us have to tell others what to do with their own property?
I think SMTs will create a lot of new and interesting opportunities for many different approaches. I'm hopeful for that, anyway. Would be cool to see airdrops of new SMT tokens based on reputation and with a cap (meaning, for example, the airdrop only goes up to, say, 10k). Keeping things more evenly spread would be very interesting to see. I imagine you'd still get to the 80/20 distribution eventually, but it would take time and in that time someone might create a new competing SMT.
Wealth concentration is a big problem when it delineates who is a tastemaker on a social media platform. It's not like STINC selected a bunch of people who had an eye for how to spot social media trends or anything to receive the first batch of STEEM in the premine.
I see that more as a problem with content discovery than with wealth distribution, which is why I'm hopeful Hivemind will fix this specific concern as will SMTs which allow for fine-tuned control of who participates in the rewards pool via SMT Oracles.
As for "tastemaker," is that really your lived experience here? I rarely look at the trending page. I'm mostly engaging with my followers and people I follow.
Maybe it's more a problem with new people who show up and see crap content on trending because of Steem Power votes from people who don't spend time curating quality content which might be interesting or valuable to investors. I don't think we'll ever see rich investors spending all their time curating. Maybe they'll delegate to curation services and earn rewards that way. If curation rewards were increased, as many are suggesting we should do, that might help. The problem there is those without Steem Power who don't really earn much curation now anyway would complain even louder about the wealth distribution issue and the whales getting even more of the rewards through their curation.
No, what the whales want to see does not dictate just what content gets seen on the trending or hot pages, but also creates incentives among other users to create material that is suitable to their primary target audience, which is going to be other supporters with high vested amounts of SP and not just ordinary people who might stroll in from outside of steemit, you know, the kind of stuff that might actually see the platform grow in user numbers. The problem is, in a dpos system where most of the wealth has been distributed, and future wealth's distribution is determined by existing stakeholders, those new eyeballs don't really mean shit so no one catered to them in earnest.