Ok, I will start this post by asking a question:
Why would you buy steem?
I will let you give your response as a comment, but I can only see two possible answers:
1.- To speculate: you expect a higher price in the future or you want to power up and earn interests.
2.- To gain more influence on steemit: powering up lots of steem will make you a dolphin or even a whale. You could use this influence to impact the rewards of others and decide which posts get more or less exposure.
In this sense, the power of whales to influence rewards is also the core value proposition of the Steem Token.
The intrinsic problem of bad whales
There has been some controversy recently regarding the right use of the flag option and whether or not whales are using their power for the best interest of steemit. But the real challange is: how do you control that power without taking away the very essence of the value of Steem?
Most whales became whales because they believed there was value in either mining or buying steem, they wanted to have power and now they do. Many of them could become consumed by this power, they could downvote you if they don’t like you and there is nothing you could do about it.
Someone could spend $250,000 and become a whale to be a total jerk. Of course, good whales will try to avoid it and this is how whale wars start!
What if we take away whale’s power?
Steem could hard fork to minimize whale’s power and have a better distribution of the steem token trough a more horizontal voting system. Minnows will sure be happy, but how about the guy who spent 250k worth of steem?, he would probably feel cheated as the rules changed after he bought himself a ticket to the whale world. There was an implicit contract between that whale and the blockchain that should not be broken.
Is Steemit just a game?
The answer to the problems I mentioned above is not easy find but I think that it would help the debate if we asked ourselves: is Steemit a game?
I believe you could argue that in life most things could be interpreted as a game, I would like to quote @craig-grant when he says that everything has a positive and a negative side, a good and bad, a ying and yang.
If we consider Steemit to be a game, then let’s play. Good whales will fight bad whales as an inevitable form of power dominance and we will see alliances, politics, betrayals and injustices. To me this is pretty much the scenario we have now.
But if Steemit is not a game, then we need to set a numbers of rules that users must obey in order to keep peace. I always like to quote this article from @onceuponatime since it lays out simple guidelines for when and how to use the flag option. I believe a witness behavior code should also be implemented.
The real problem
Whales are making a lot of SP on interests and curation rewards, which makes it harder for aspiring whales to catch up to them. You could have a killer 15k post like @dollarvigilante did and still be miles away compared to the 50 largest steem whales. You can also try to buy yourself into the whale world but this is also getting more expensive.
This situation could result in fewer whales joining the ocean, if whales become rarer their influence on votes will become bigger. More posts will go without rewards as the total population of the ocean will grow and more posts will be published but fewer whales to vote for them.
The bottom line is that we need whales and we are going to need more of them as the platform grows.
My personal opinion is that the current distribution system needs to be changed to reach as many users as possible, but this has to be done while protecting the core value of Steem and the implicit contract signed with current whales. It is not an easy task but I am sure @dantheman and his team are already brainstorming the hell out of this one!