I will become a whale in 24hours, here's how.

Do I have your curiosity?
The main purpose of this post is to clear some misconceptions about how the value of your upvote is calculated, what's the effect of some of the future changes and a little FUN!

Here's my plan to evolve from dolphin to whale in 24 hours.

I'll first go to http://steemwhales.com and look at my ranking.

Now all I have to do is convince all of the above me to STOP UPVOTING! That's 683 people. But I'm not getting discouraged! 133 of the top 500 users didn't even vote once so I'm looking at about 550 people. I'm just gonna start a very very aggresive campaign.
PEOPLE of STEEMIT! If you care, write to your local whale and help my cause :D "Raz for WHALE!" [ billboard coming soon on a ledger near you! ]

You might be wondering now why would that even work.

Here's the idea, if no one above me would upvote than my upvote will be the most valuable upvote on Steemit. I would essentially have a whale-level upvote at dolphin level SP. Why is that?

The Deal

There are too pools: A money pool. A voting pool. These two pool are independent of each other but correlated.
There is a fixed amount of "money" from pool A to be distributed to the content creator. The allocation of the money is influenced by how powerful and how many votes happen in pool B.

Right now, pool B has huge votes from whales, which in turn makes my vote mean very little and its value, allocated from pool A is very small, a few cents. BUT if everyone above me will STOP upvoting then my vote, allocated proportionally from pool B would be HUGE. Of course, there will be many dolphin-whales to share the throne so I will never reach dan/ned/smooth level but it will still be HUGE.

Beyond my dreams of upvoting crazy$$ what is, in fact, the important conclusion?
That we don't ACTUALLY need for whales to vote more. In fact, we might not need them at all.
Because the way it is set up to be:

I think is the most important sentence in this post. Take a moment to think about it...

If only one person were to upvote, then all the rewards would be concentrated in that one and only upvote!
If two people were to upvote, then all the rewards would be concentrated in those two upvotes, proportionally to their vesting power. Let's say I and dantheman are the sole upvoters, then pray he upvotes you, because my vote won't be worth much but it will still be A LOT more than I currently have.

The Consequence

I think this is something that need to be better communicated - it's rather difficult to dig this information and understand it - which would leads to a lot less misunderstanding. Because once this becomes clear, it's easy to see why the new 5 votes rule could be great for YOU, the average content curator. And why hoping that more whales upvote, so maybe you hit one of the big upvotes is actually hurting YOUR perspective in the long run.

Because as whales vote less, your voting value goes up! And as it is, you give more value to various people you follow and like. In time, this will lead to more people having more SP in circle that eventually will see Steemit with a very healthy distribution.. A strong Steemit middle class would be good for everyone.

Sadly, my plan to become a whale overnight is not going to work, because everyone has an incentive to upvote for curation rewards and to stay ahead of dilution. Oh well, I'll do it the ol' fashioned way: by writing good content :)

Thank you for reading and I hope this was useful.

R.