Linear rewards are making minnows matter in the math.
It's true that if the whales were to sit on their SP and not vote it then things would be a lot better for everyone else. The only problem with this is it's a completely insane thing to do, because staking has a time cost. Why would you stake SP and not use it?
Alternately they could all power down and hold Steem in hopes that it would go up in value as the rewards were distributed without them. That's only slightly less insane, and it has a pretty big Prisoner's Dilemma attached to it, because it drastically increases the self-voting rewards of any whale who chooses to stay. Not to mention we'd see even more volatility and downward movement in the price as they could choose to get out whenever they wanted.
Or they could power down and sell their Steem, which makes more sense for them, and we'd all get a lot more Steem out of the rewards pool but it wouldn't be worth anything.
None of these are good plans.
If enough of the big whales really felt the platform was better under the Whale Experiment and wanted to replicate it I suppose they could just start using their full power to flag other whale votes indiscriminately. I don't think that's a good plan either but it makes more mathematical sense, if not social sense.
In any case going to superlinear rewards is the exact opposite of the Whale Experiment. If you want to replicate that in the code you'd want extreme hyperbolic or even parabolic rewards. (And you'd have to find a way to prevent whales from just making a hundred dolphin accounts.)
So, buying btc, eth, or any other coin and holding is insane?
Yes, steem allows roi by being active, but if whales are destroying the interest of others in playing along by doing so, that is insane.
Mass adoption is the main goal, is it not?
Nobody likes that the massive accounts suck the air out of the room, they dont like the pay to play, nor the people doing it.
Those massive accounts need to wake up to the fact that they are best served by mass adoption even if that means not maximizing roi under the rules.
When tens of thousands of minnows start to buy 20usd a week in stake the whales benefit the most, that isnt going to happen while they are making the game unattractive to those specific players.
Why would small investors invest if it all goes to the massive accounts and they have no hope of making roi, themselves?
Let alone in large numbers.
Making 100 dolphin accounts would be fine if they didnt selfvote or circlejerk, if it spread the rewards farther, that would be a good thing.
I thought spreading sp came with a cost under nonlinear rewards?
Even if the massive accounts sold every last steem, they could only do so to willing buyers who could then start building what steem could be with out the massive accounts greedy grubbing it to the detriment of everybody else.
Committing to holding anything for 13 weeks without receiving anything in return for that commitment would be insane, yes.
The main thing preventing minnows from doing that isn't that whales are circle-jerking, it's that 20 USD doesn't buy them any noticeable amount of effectiveness. That's probably the biggest problem for mass adoption on an influx-of-money level.
This isn't happening. My ROI is ridiculous and I spend a lot of time and money I don't have to on community-building.