The original claim was off by power of two in the case of @wang.
You're talking about SP, I'm talking about VESTS. That 2.5k SP he powered down this week is the equivalent to 7.8125 million VEST. That's exactly what my original claim was about. I still don't see where the statement was false, maybe I'm just dense. Where's this power of two you speak of?
This is not devil's advocate, it is simply false (as far as I know) that people are currently making as much from curation as they are powering down.
It's true if you look at it from a monthly perspective. Here's wang's ~30 days history, the red line is VESTS:
3 power downs, 1 week of no power downs, and only curation. It's pretty much even. If you want to run the numbers yourself, here's an API endpoint with every day's snapshot:
https://steemdb.com/api/account/wang/snapshots
My entire point was that if we went from 75/25, to 50/50, that the red line in the chart above would be increasing faster. I am not against early adopters making some profit, we're all early adopters here. I'm also not against bots, but I do think they should be kept in check.
Finally even if it were true, would it matter?
In my opinion - yes, it would. As I learn more about the subject, it may not matter to me anymore, but currently my perception (and others) feel this is a problem.
Thanks for the good discussions on the topic :)