Just to clarify the numbers used in my previous post were completely random. I don't know exactly how much accounts worth $8000 would be able to give.
That wouldn't work because one could just create a bunch of sock-puppet accounts and earn 500$ daily by upvoting these accounts.
Moderators will downvote content that's overpaid. If someone want to upvote sockpuppets and hope to get a payout from it he will have to post great content, in which case he probably deserves the payout. Moderators will be responsible to give posts their right value. They will be the biggest stake holder so it's in their interest that the system is fair for everyone.
It might be not exact numbers, but this dilemma remains anyway:
-you give more power for litte investment and the intensity to game the sistem appears
-you give less power for investment and no one is interested to power up
Moderators could possibly identify only very big and apparent cases, if I upvote 40 sock-pupprts 5$ each...or even better create a bigger circle of 1$ upvotes - there's no way to stop it when downvoting manually.
It is very easy to spot uncommon behaviour on a public blockchain, and most of the work would be done by bots.
Whales could upvote sockpuppets with the current set up, why aren't they doing it? They would be detected easily.
Well, yes, because there's just a few dozens whales around it would be rather easy to spot it and counterflag, but not with many thousends of users. Bots would be no help because there's nothing uncommon by someone upvoting the same bunch of accounts day by day. In fact any SteemVoter user is doing it right now.
Like I mentionned in the proposal, a report button could help moderators find shill overpaid content.
But I really don't think it's going to be necessary, moderators could use all sort of filters to narrow down list of users who could potentially abuse the system, then they will only have to monitor only a small part of the network.