I was just wondering how many up-votes would it take for someone to receive 1 dollar if he received all the votes from freshly created 10 steem accounts.
This question also made think about the power of big whales in steem, how many minnows would make up for a whale?
The answer to this question will show the full extent of the difference between large steem power holders and small users.
So, I am not sure how the payouts are calculated so I took a comment that got upvoted by @smooth and received 110 usd as the basis of my analysis:
So with a very basic primary school level rule of 3, I came up with this:
If someone with 772.349 Steem power upvoting me rewarded 110 USD, how much would 10 steem power get me?
772.349 Steem ------> 110 USD
10 Steem -------------->?
10*110/772.349 = 0.0014 USD
As you can see, with my current steem power (157) a new account should get me 0.0014. Maybe I am missing something here (please tell me if I am), but for the sake of argument lets continue assuming that this is true and answer the questions I mentioned at the begging of the post:
How many up-votes would it take for someone to receive 1 dollar if he received all the votes from freshly created 10 steem accounts? (Assuming he has same steem power as me)
1 usd / 0.0014 = 714 up-votes
How many minnows would make up for a whale?
110 usd whale vote / 0.0014 usd minnow vote = 78.571 votes
Conclusion:
As you can see, the results show the enormous influence of whales in the platform, something that in my opinion could discourage or even frustrate new users. In theory this problem will be partially solved after the first payout on the 4th of July, since a lot of users will increase their vote power and vote on different stuff, thus distributing steem power to more and more people who post on different subjects.
However, small accounts will still need to get lucky and catch the attention of a large holder. An incredible viral post with 714 upvotes from small holders gets only 1 dollar and a normal post that gets up-voted by 1 whale gets more than 100 bucks!
A possible fix to this situation would be to give bonuses to posts according to the amount of votes they get, regardless of the power of users who voted for them. For example, a post could receive 1 dollar if it reaches over 10 votes, 2 dollars if it gets 20 and so on. In that way minnows will be rewarded for popular content even if whales don’t vote for them.