I agree that I (we) don’t know how to measure what ratio of “abuse” there is. And then we have to define ‘abuse’ as I guess collusion? Because there’s not really any abuse in the sense that users are just gaming the system protocol as they are (should be) able to in a free market.
I think the consistent point we might be able to agree on is that voting for rewards sourced from a pool shared by everyone, can’t in any possible reformulation of the protocol (other than truly randomized rewards?), prevent the rewards from being inexorably disproportionately more concentrated over time?
Actually perhaps you might quibble about that not being proven, for example arguing that competing cartels would form to create a stalemate? Yet I would argue that such cartel wars are precarious and unstable, because when Godzilla and King Kong fight, they tend to be clumsy (preoccupied focus) and trampled the working order of things around them. IOW, top-down driven things fail overall. Which is essentially my argument against consortium blockchains. In my conceptualization, Steem and EOS are milking machines for the whales to extract from while the pie is expanding, but when the crypto winter comes they’ll be potentially fighting over a shrinking pie. When everyone is making money, there’s less incentive for an out-all brawl, in order to prevent the disruption of flow of gains. But under a collapse scenario, it’s worth risking a fight to winner-take-all as there’s really nothing to lose by trying. America’s melting pot and assimilation of immigrants was held up by the same expanding economic pie mutual incentive, but even that is being eroded now.
Although that concentration happens anyway due to the power-law of distribution of wealth (the wealthy have low expenditures as percentage of net worth so they can accumulate), my goal has been for a long-time to find a way that the whales could not have any adverse impact on the decentralized ledger. They wouldn’t be able to effectively buy influence. Proof-of-work arguably doesn’t entirely accomplish this; and besides it was shown that the transaction fee revenue model can in theory ameliorate the incentive for the longest chain to be unique.
My theme of what I am working on is I posit that the coming crypto winter is going to be the ideal time to build something like Steem that is more focused on real usage (which Steem has somewhat achieved but I think we can do better) and without the whale extraction. Because during the Dot.com crash/winter many hitech people who were unemployed were experimenting in their home offices that became the Web 2.0 innovation and startups. So in the coming global economic downturn which is accelerating probably next year (seriously accelerating in California and Europe), and the posited concomitant crypto winter, we have a huge opportunity to employ people in creative contribution on decentralized ledgers.
My open question is has Steem attained some qualities or could it change to do so, such that it could fulfill that posited role?
P.S. Thanks for the upvote on my crypto winter blog. I’m not lacking funds any more, but I do appreciate that blog post attaining more exposure as maybe it can help others. Also it helps for me to get more followers for any project announcement I might make on Steem. I've decided not to post to BCT anymore after the latest ban several weeks ago. Seems all the (highly capable programmers) old timers such as yourself rarely post there any more. Besides head down work to do.
RE: Voting is a popularity contest