Welcome back to the Game Theory of Steem!

As always, if you're just joining us, I encourage you to check out the rest of the series ([Part 1](https://steemit.com/steem/@biophil/what-does-game-theory-say-about-steem-part-1), [Part 2](https://steemit.com/economics/@biophil/beauty-contests-the-game-theory-of-steem-part-2), [Part 3](https://steemit.com/money/@biophil/is-steem-paying-for-groupthink-the-game-theory-of-steem-part-3), [Part 4](https://steemit.com/gametheory/@biophil/what-s-a-minnow-to-do-the-game-theory-of-steem-part-4), and [Part 5](https://steemit.com/steem/@biophil/what-do-you-believe-the-game-theory-of-steem-part-5)) to get a bit of background on where we are.

Also, I'm happy to report that my brother just joined Steem as @brownsgreens, take a look at his [introduceyourself post!](https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@brownsgreens/just-grow-food)

The goal of the series is to analyze how people's strategic voting and posting can lead to weird, possibly-unexpected outcomes. We're looking a lot at incentives.

In this installment, we're going to ask (and answer) a very simple question: **Could a bunch of minnows band together and exercise the same clout as a whale?** Everybody here (at least all the minnows) are seeming pretty frustrated that it feels like you basically need to attract whale attention in order to get reasonable payouts on a post, because whale votes have a lot more influence than minnow votes. But **what if** instead of going and finding a whale, you could **form a cartel of minnows?**

![](https://ipfs.pics/ipfs/QmXUfJKSTYaRNVNtwFyhn4bmYo7Xr1NvAonn6cnY6Gss3w)
(image credit [Brandon Cole](http://www.brandoncole.com))

It should be clear to everyone that if you could band together enough minnows and have all of them vote on the same post, it would be the same as if a whale had voted on it.

### How does minnow power compare to whale power?

Take a look at this chart that I pulled off of [steemd.com](https://steemd.com/distribution) last week:

![](https://ipfs.pics/ipfs/QmSmqkUpmQUpM38ZjVkGDwMmpb9fVhTSCK1J3kFUM5vYyV)

It's just a tiny bit confusing if you haven't seen it before, so I'll walk through it step by step. **This chart breaks all Steem accounts into 7 categories:** "dust," "newbie," "user," and so on all the way up to "legend." See the **MV** column? MV stands for "megavests"; for our purposes, we can think of this as a proxy for the amount of Steem Power an account has. One MV currently equals about 257 Steem Power.

Here's how to read the chart:

1. Look at the **row** that says "newbie" or 0.01 MV. 
2. The **accts** column tells us *how many accounts* have between 0.01 and 0.1 MV; at current rates that means between 2.57 and 25.7 Steem Power. See, there are over **32,000** "newbie" (or shall we say "minnow?") accounts!
3. The **stake** column tells us *how much of the total Steem Power* is owned by each type of user. So this says that minnows control only **0.45%** of the total Steem Power.
1. On the other hand, the "legend" or **whale** accounts have over **64%** of the total SP *in just 45 accounts.*

I'll tell you right now, this is not looking good for our hypothetical minnow-cartel. Why? **Because your vote influence is proportional to your Steem Power, and 45 accounts control over half the Steem Power in existence!**

### First question: if all the minnows banded together, how powerful would they be?

This one is easy! We just need to look at [Steemwhales.com](https://steemwhales.com) and find a single account that controls about 0.45% of the total SP. There are some un-interesting details that I'll share in the comments if you want (in particular, we're looking at 0.45% of the SP that *isn't* controlled by @steemit), but here's the juicy bit: we can calculate that 0.45% of the total SP is 243,316 SP; then we search down [the Steem Power rankings](http://steemwhales.com/?p=1&s=power) on Steemwhales.com and find that (as of this writing), @au1nethyb1 has just shy of 244,000 SP, as I show in this screenshot:

![](https://ipfs.pics/ipfs/QmeiFFS1MnhB5B7nGsvJtoqFKoTRTpcardECiZ3Bqn9Nnf)

**So there is our incredibly-unsatisfying answer: if *all minnows banded together, they would only be as powerful as the 48th-largest account*.**

Bummer, dude. Let's try something else.

### How many minnows would it take to be as powerful as a big whale, say @berniesanders?

Hopefully everybody has run into @berniesanders at some point; if he votes for you, let's just say you're in *super* good shape. He packs a lot of power in his votes, so why don't we take a trip to fairy-land and imagine that we could recruit an unlimited number of minnows to try and make it rain like @berniesanders does. Here is a screenshot including his stats:

![](https://ipfs.pics/ipfs/QmTF5sFDe1C81mhPksRNsNABLSMGwXruN4k119iTau7zxg)

According to [steemwhales](http://steemwhales.com/?p=1&s=power), @berniesanders has over 1.7 *million* SP; that's 7 times more than the little whale we looked at earlier. That means we'd need *7 times more minnows than currently exist to be as influential as @berniesanders.*

**Here's the second incredibly-unsatisfying answer: *we would need roughly 237,000 minnows to impersonate @berniesanders*.** That is over 5 times as many *accounts of any size* that currently exist on Steem.

So, this is honestly pretty disappointing at the moment. But let's not get too depressed - the system is new, and already it looks like we're seeing the SP get distributed out a bit more equitably. If you look on [steemd.com](https://steemd.com/distribution) today, the minnows now control 0.47%, up 0.02 percentage points from last week. It's not a big increase (duh), but at least it's moving in the right direction

Many many thanks to @heimindanger and his [Steemwhales.com](https://steemwhales.com); if you like the work he is doing, you should toss an upvote towards [his latest post](https://steemit.com/whales/@heimindanger/steemwhales-update-reputation-and-steem-power-withdrawal).