I appreciate your thinking on this matter, and I wish I could agree it was the grand solution.
A guy I like a lot said something like 'the kind of thinking that got you in trouble isn't going to get you out of it'.
Solving financial manipulation with more manipulation seems pointless. Two lefts don't make a right, it takes three lefts.
Stake weighting VP opens vectors for manipulation. It also makes the witnesses but commodoties, ripe for the picking of anyone willing to pony up to takeover the blockchain.
There's a solution - delink VP from SP.
No more circle-jerks, no more vote-buying, no more Sybil attacks as easy as buying a soda. Sure there'd still be problems on Steemit, like botnets, spam, etc., but less of them - and those problems have to be handled differently, anyway.
I've never once used a votebot, never self vote, and don't promote my posts. Steemit is a social media platform, and I am unwilling to promote society that consists of bots. Society, to me, means people interacting.
I don't disparage people that feel differently, I understand that my personal views are mine alone.
But they are mine, and I stand by them.
Delinking SP from VP solves many of the problems Steemit is being repressed by, and I would really like to move forward on a platform where the ROI of whales isn't what determines if content is high quality.
Because, it really isn't.
Frank Zappa said that top40 lists had little relation to the quality of music, and ROI has just as little to do with Steemit posts quality.
Perhaps grand solution was strongly put, I used it jokingly in chat and just kinda adopted it. That being said, the reason I came up with this is because ideas like yours require A) A massive overhaul of the current system and B) all the witnesses and devs to agree unanimously in the first place.
This, as we have evidently seen has led to basically not much of anything being done over a very long period of time. In a system where it has so far taken over a month to NOT fix the error problem when posting a blog, you can't sit around twiddling your thumbs demanding the system be completely made-over from the bottom up, or even moderate programming changes.
Even if that were to happen, people manipulating the system is a fact of life, look at steemit, the governments of the world, the police, hackers, no matter what we do to try and suppress and prevent crime or manipulation, it will always happen.
Rather than have a costly war on drugs that costs billions of dollars and thousands of lives, why not legalize and regular drugs?
Likewise, rather than try to stop the highest wallets from taking all the money and giving it arbitrarily to those undeserved, why not embrace their position in a way that benefits them and us alike?
Even if your solution did solve every problem, it's not realistic to think it'll happen in the next 12 years, if ever. Mine is a quick and easy solution, perhaps imperfect in an imperfect world, that keeps things honest and open, no?
Well, I confess, I don't think your idea will make it any worse.
I'll do that, if you delink SP from VP.
Deal?
Sure! But even if we all agree on your idea, it still won't happen for years to come
I don't think Steemit has years to come, in it's present form. If SMT's are popular, the the stake weighted votes that control the witnesses will allow Zuckerburg, or Eric Schmidt, or some cabal, to simply purchase the accounts holding the mined Steem that controls the witnesses, and the blockchain will be in the hands of the enemy - and those mined stakes will become golden parachutes the Steemit founders drift off into the sunset on.
I am aware of several forks of Steemit in development presently. Furthemore, with retention after one year at ~11%, including botnets and alt accounts, Steemit is facing a crash of users right now.
Steemit doesn't have years.
Edit: only delinking VP from SP protects the witnesses from this Sybil attack, presently as easy for moguls to prosecute as buying a soda.