This is the ultimate controversy for a lot of people on SteemIt. I've been thinking about it a lot the past months and i think I've come to a conclusion. I will compare the current implementation with an implementation where STEEM POWER doesn't directly have impact on your stake in the reward pool. You might be surprised about the impact!

Implementation comparison

Current implementation

• You own a portion of the reward pool based on your STEEM POWER
• You can increase your influence without contributing to the network directly (releasing content or actively curating)
• Having more STEEM POWER increases your absolute curation rewards
• Investors can use SteemIt for marketing purposes through promoted content
• Being very profitable at curating isn't relevant when having a large amount of STEEM POWER

Hypothetical implementation

• STEEM POWER doesn't impact your stake in the reward pool
• You can NOT increase your influence without contributing to the network directly (releasing content or actively curating)
• Having more STEEM POWER increases your absolute curation rewards
• Investors can use SteemIt for marketing purposes through promoted content
• Being very profitable at curating is very relevant regardless of the amount of STEEM POWER

Effects of this hypothetical implementation

• Users don't have more influence than other users (let alone 100s of other users combined) purely based on stake
• Content will be curated way more accurately because there is way less statistical variance in author rewards
• Everyone gets rewarded based on their contribution to the network
• Large stake holders still make more (absolute) money than smaller stake holders
• Investors can still use SteemIt for marketing purposes through promoted content
• Being more profitable at curating is very relevant
• The more STEEM POWER you have, the more motivation you have to curate as profitably as possible

Conclusion

The only drastic change for large STEEM POWER holders seems to be that they wouldn't be able to make content trending by themselves anymore. This is only a good thing, because who's better at deciding what's trending; 1 person or millions of people?

Curation is a more relevant way to change a user's influence! When the platform would measure curation skill (average relative profit per voting power), curators with a better relative profit should have more influence because they recognize more profitable opportunities better than others (and therefore contribute more to to the platform). I suggest renaming reputation to something like "author score" (which will only be visible next to content) and adding a "curation score" and renaming that to reputation (which will only be visible next the user in curation lists).

The more STEEM POWER you have, the more motivation you would have to be as profitable as possible with curation (similar to Poker where players with a large bankroll are much better on average than players with a small bankroll). If you are better than others at curating, your vote is essentially more relevant than others.

In this new implementation investors would still have incentive to invest in STEEM POWER because of the 0.1425% (15% of 0.95%) annual interest and getting relative curation rewards based on curation skill. SteemIt curation is a game of skill where you are essentially playing against other curators. Similar to Poker, it might look like gambling, but the better curators win more in the long run.

When everyone's vote is equal, one concern might be multi-accounting. This is actually already handled fairly well. You need to fill in your e-mail and phone number to get access to a new account. After that you need to pay for any extra accounts you want. Of course this can still be abused, but not profitably in my opinion, because a few extra accounts to vote on your own content isn't gonna make much of a difference when thousands, if not millions of others are also curating your content.

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