Yesterday I was reading a post with suggestions on how witness votes could decay if the witness were to go offline, and would reinstate then when the witness is back up. The effect of this would be to encourage witnesses to fix downtime issues as efficiently as possible. Good for the Steemit platform right?
If you missed that post you can read it here
https://steemit.com/witness/@themarkymark/witness-temporary-vote-decay-proposal
After reading the post it made me think of something I thought of a long time ago and only ever raised in conversations in DM.
The Problem's
Existing Investors need to be able to cash out of Steemit without an impact on the coins value or on the sentiment of the community. There have been some Power Downs and moving from savings to exchanges which has caused concern to some of the community. Really people should be able to do this without gossip and other knock on effects. I think these effects are because the volume of power is spread to thin and this creates fear when these people want to take some out of steemit.
Distribution of power has been a problem on stemmit since the beginning, down to the time of mining. And getting power is not easy. You can earn it with posts, curation and contents. You can buy it or you can earn it as a witness.
There are too few large accounts on steemit.
Blame is put on the few existing large accounts and whales.
The crypto market is suffering, market cap is reducing and very few new investors are entering the market.
Solutions to date:
Curation progams that help find and reward great content. This helps spread rewards around users of the platform. There are many of these from the funded to the not funded.
Delegations from investors to Dapps, most notably Steemit Inc via Misterdelegation
Community Engagement, Retention and Power Up programs to encourage positive use of the platform and long term thinking.
I do not want to dismiss the efforts of those working hard, and all of these initiative are working towards common goals, but they are not making much impact of creating new larger accounts at a rate fast enough to allow old investors make the choices they want. These efforts are being made my multiple people and communities, some of which are our witnesses.
So what if?
Witnesses earn SP. With the top 20 making most of the SP every week. Before we look at some values and people start giving out, it takes a lot of work to make it to the top 20. An investment of both time and money is involved. Now, by the time someone makes it to the top 20 they have probably incurred a loss and have spent countless hours on the system. In the ‘normal’ world of working and jobs, these would be paid well for the work they do and many under the top 20 would be considered under paid. So when they make it to the top 20, some of the earning is reimbursement for the previous month’s effort and work.
But what if we implemented a temporary measure where there was no top 20, instead a top 50?
Yesterday 125 witnesses produced 1 or more blocks. Earning between them 13,914,168 VESTS, approx. 6860 SP in total. Not a world changing amount by any means.
What if these rewards were split equally between the top 50 for a 3 month period? After 90 days we would have 50 witness accounts that have earned SP of over 12K.
12K SP is not a whale, and I am not sure it would make that much difference but is it worth a thought?
I understand anyone in the top 20 would probably not agree with this idea, and I know if after a year of 
It’s very hard to come up with ideas that will even out the distribution of SP, but it is a big problem not only for the current users, and investors, but also the long term growth and sustainability of the platform.
How do you feel about the distribution of SP held, and what steps could we take to improve the situation for all, for current investors, witnesses, projects, authors and curators? Please do leave your comments below and lets have a discussion about this.