good lukc!

> At the same time as we need more whales, don't forget that the current whales are re-distributing their wealth while at the same time powering down. 

untrue.  im actually going to post a more complete picture with real numbers for curation rewards and blogging rewards.    But even the least optimistic numbers you typically see on this site don't tell the whole story.

https://steemit.com/steem/@sigmajin/cooking-the-books-the-real-story-of-whales-and-dilution

Yes, the rich are getting richer and harder to catch... so in the future there will be fewer whales and the ones we have now will have more power.. this could become a problem in the future.

> And the rich are now growing richer on Steem.

One week does not a trend make. The longer trend is the opposite. At least, more data is needed before reaching such a conclusion.

Well, to be fair - who really cares about commercial use pictures of coffee or even posts about non-existent "whale wars?" 

The answer is: the people voting for them. 

If you want quality content, you need quality voters. As it stands, many posters and voters are just playing the "trending topic" game. Tons of quality content is being ignored or completely drowned out and I don't really see a lot of whales helping to curate such content. At some point the game is going to have to change or lots of the quality writers will simply bail.

I would love to be able to get recognition for my posts, but instead, I just keep seeing whales and other influential voters complaining about trending content - when *they* are the ones who can actually correct it and start supporting those who are doing everything they can to get their quality posts in front of more eyes and be rewarded for their talents and efforts.

If whales want quality, it's in their power to find it and reward it. Isn't that the reason for being a whale? To ensure long-term viability of the platform by retaining those who can produce quality over quantity? Or is that not the case?

It’s hard to decide what is good and bad without a set of written rules. There is always going to be 2 sides to every story. 

What I tried to explain in the post is that whale’s power, good or bad, is the only thing giving Steem value at this point... taking it away completely could be far worse than the injustices some may think occur from time to time.... what we need is an efficient form to distribute Steem in order to have **MORE** whales.

I agree with you. I don have seen anny bad whales yet, and could not think it is that they want.

Ewery early adopter does wath he wants, and if they dont vote ewerything dat doesen mater. Couse the voting power sink ewery time you do a vote, so maby peaple who are noob understand why. 

I have been here on steemit for a month now, and i see a realy bigg an fast growth. But some of the post who get bigg dollar vote lock wierd. But i dont care. I do my best to became a whale also. Since i am also a kind of early adopter here. 

I reqruit friends all the time, and expect a wery big growth on this beta platform :) 

Have a nice day guys

> but who really cares about a post bragging about how much someone has earned that says the same thing that's been posted hundreds of time on here?

I like how u look at it. But, what about posts like this - [Win 12.5 BTC by tweeting about Steem](https://steemit.com/steem/@bbw/win-12-5-btc-by-tweeting-about-steem) ?

Are you really what people mean by "bad whale"? You have your own tastes and you're an enigma :) .. But there's the other issue of like Facebook etc coming in to try to make it a worse experience when/if Steem gets big. 

I'm a noob and just getting used to how it all works, but I find all this whale stuff interesting lol.

what, flag every post that a jerk like @berniesanders upvotes?

Can't the whale just create a few alternate IDs that are commenting on threads and then upvoting them? In this way these IDs will get 100$ out of 100$.

Creation rewards need to be higher for the lower steam power levels and lower for the higher steam power levels - a gradually decreasing scale from the highest SP or vests on the network to the lowest. 

Right now I there is not enough incentive to actively curate content.

I think even the power at which whales can boost posts should be lowered slightly and minnows increased slightly.

¨So far the best solution we have identified is to remove curation rewards all together. ¨
wow, thats great!  You seem to read my mind :)  I also had the feeling, that currently curation rewards do only harm to the system. The possibility to allocate funds itself should already be a big enough incentive to use your steem power. Currently with many big accounts not using their voting power, effectively you get nearly twice your money to distribute to good content of your choice. 

Instead we could give the curation reward to fully verified participants as some kind of universal dividend. This would massively encourage newcomers to join and drastically help to balance the voting power. 

The verification could be done decentralized through video chats and local meetups. The identity should be proofed from at least two randomly selected verificators. The verificators then make a list that could be voted on by selected witnesses lets call them sentries. The verification process itself must not necessarily be in the protocol, it would be enough if the sentries can vote on the verified member list.

The allocation could be done the following:
Universal dividend = (SP+SP)/(SP+AverageSP)  
With SP = Steem Power of this user 
AverageSP = Average Steem Power of the lowest 80% of the verified users

With this formula the more Steem Power the user has the more dividend the user will get. But at max twice then another verified user.  With this in place steem holders could borrow / delegate  their steem power to new users and get some kind of interest for it. In the long run this would help to distribute steem more fairly and at the same time encourage newcomers to join. 

On top of that 50% of the universal dividend could be used to encourage purchases, investments and donation done with steem or steem dollars.

For example if a user purchases something from a verified steem businesses he can get up to 20% back from his universal dividend ¨pot¨.
This would encourage the user to use up to 5 times his universal dividend for transactions. 

Through the block-chain transparency cheating users and businesses could be easily detected.
From the participating businesses we could require a certain kind of ethics like for example the common good economy movement does: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_for_the_Common_Good 

In summary, we could not only attract many more users,  make steem more welcoming to newcomers, increase drastically the use of steem / steem dollar as currency, but on top of it also help to propagate a value based economy that does not destroy our planet.

What do we want more! Lets go for it!
Happy steeming!

Dan -

I don't think it's necessarily a flaw with curating, but more of an issue with the whales that are curating. It seems that many of them are voting on posts for the express purpose of making money, not for seeking and rewarding quality. 

There appears to be a feedback loop consisting of trending topic and whale voting, then an influx of other voters jumping in to "ride the whale," so to speak, in order to try to get some of the curating rewards. You can even see some of the attempts at preemption from dolphins and minnows. A post less than a minute old can have four or five pages worth of content, but already have upwards of 10-20 votes. 

The whales should probably start seeking better quality content if they want a viable platform for the long haul. That's going to involve passing on the easy cash and spending more time searching new and obscure contributors. The question is whether or not the whales that don't currently do that are willing to do so.

Do the curation rewards include *the value of the voter's own upvote*? If it does, that should be changed before ever considering the removal of curation rewards entirely. Average users appreciate curation rewards, and taking them away removes an incentive to engage with the platform. But typical users don't really benefit much from the 25% of their own vote, which is at best a penny or two.

I am but a minnow who can't afford to buy steem.  I am not incentivised to curate for profit because as a minnow there is barely a profit.  And that's how it should be for a minnow.

But for those who have steem, such as the dolphins, the end of curation rewards I believe would be the end of steemit.  And without the dolphins steemit isn't very promising for the minnows either.

**There has to be another solution** and thank you @dantheman for putting the issues here for everybody to brainstorm on.

There may be holes in my suggestion as I know that @steemit holds the majority stake of steemit.
**But I'll throw it here just in case you haven't thought of it yet.**
First of all I think the proposal you made in your last post about proxy vests for friends is going to massively improve the platform building lots of dolphins who can help with future bad behaviour.

Currently the more SP you have the more you accumulate from curating content.  You say that per account caps will result in sybil attacks and since I'm not very techy maybe my suggestion doesn't get passed that either.
### What if curators with higher SP could get higher curation rewards only up to a point?  Such as a 3% stake of all steem or even 1% once this is further distributed
Would this prevent a 'whale-gone-rogue' from overcoming others as to remain vote-active on the platform they would have to remain below whatever SP that % is at at any given time?