Throughout reading this post keep this question in mind:

What has and still is Steemit's biggest problem?

I've been clenching my brain for the past 2 days trying to understand what the heck is happening to Steemit. I've been on board for about 2 months now, every day, voting, engaging on Steemit.chat, posting, and the sh*t has not hit the fan like it did in the last week. Why the heck is this happening?

Here's a couple things that ticket it off for me:

• Hive account@dantheman has posted about 1h ago (about a new feature introduction...sigh) after a pause of over 1 week!!! He may be busy, but he can't be too busy to do a post and he was very active in the past. Steemit is his baby, yet he's ignoring it? It doesn't make any sense.
• People keep posting rants about losing faith in Steemit and more recently encouraging Synereo like it's a breath of fresh air compared to Steemit, yet none of the whales are taking serious actions about it. Respectable community members are at each other's throats and the whales seem like they are actually encouraging the actions through upvotes when in the past they were actually downvoting them. Also, whales have suddenly stopped upvoting comments as often as they were, like they want to discourage people engagement or something...
• Some weird accounts have surfaced (thanks Hive account@klye for uncovering them), brand new accounts that are being pumped by some whales with over 1k rewards from the first post and continuing with each new post. WTH? Who's this lucky? Let me tell you: nobody!
• And this one really was the drop that spilled the cup: One of Steemit's most epic ambassadors and most active community orca, Hive account@stellabelle, is now throwing everything under the bus and moving to Synereo? Bashing Steemit, Dan, etc.? That doesn't make any sense! Synereo doesn't even exist, who does that??

Coming back to our question:

What is Steemit's biggest, most serious problem?

Answer: Power distribution. The fact that 9x% of Steem is held by a handful of people. This creates an unbalanced reward system and has been bleeding the community dry from the start.

What are the options to balance the power?

Whale, whale, whale... more whales, right? Becoming a whale can happen in two ways:

1. By earning rewards and Powering Up but this will take ages.
2. By buying Steem but even though it's low, it's still considered high for people to jump in and buy it.

So it seems we're in a pickle, as the system continues to be unbalanced and the actions to balance it are unlikely to create any correction soon, unless...

The Master Plan is unraveling

Increasing rewards is impossible as there's a limited number of Steem allocated to post rewards on a daily basis. Then what if say, the price of Steem would be low, so low, that people would find it really convenient to buy it and Power Up. The latter seems like the option but for that to happen the price of Steem would need to be really low. Like .05$-.10$ low.

How can the price of Steem get that low?

First and most unlikely option would be through a huge dump. That will never happen as everything would crumble irreparably.

But what if the price of Steem can be lowered organically. Are you starting to see where I'm going with this?
The story that was really mindblowing for me was Hive account@stellabelle's post yesterday. It's really impossible for someone like her to turn their back on Steemit after investing so much into it. Unless it's been intended to look like that. Unless it's rigged.

What if a general chaos can be instilled in the ecosystem, people complaining would not be stopped anymore (whale downvoting), shitposting is encouraged and driven to the Trending page, less communication from the whales (no comments/answers unless something really hits the fan, like Hive account@stellabelle's rant that made Hive account@ned comment), developers seem to not add features that are most important to everyone etc. Would that drive the Steem price down? Yes. Would a low Steem price solve Steemit's biggest problem? Yes.

So you see, what we now regard as the worst thing that can happen to Steemit is actually a very smart, elaborate plan to actually save Steemit. Sometimes, if you love something, you have to let it go and that's what the whales do with their Steem, they let it go to others, almost free, so that Steemit may be saved!

A Doube-Edged sword

So the plan to balance the Power on Steemit is working as Steem has gotten to about 0.70$. I know it rose a little today, but that is just fo' the show I believe.

Say we get to the point where 1 Steem = 0.05$. The other sharp side of the of the Masterplan sword could be that people could be long gone and nobody will be interested in Steemit anymore when the price reaches that low point. So, even if it will be cheap, no one will care anymore about Steem, Steemit et all and it will go to waste.
People have gone past one weird Steemit episode when the Steem was distributed right at the beginning and some have said it was rigged and never stands a chance to succeed. Would they be allowed another pass?
Fingers crossed this will be a soft landing as Steemit is a great place for all of us and it would be a shame to loose it.

PS. To prove the points above, you'll see that no whale will upvote this post, as that would mean they agree with the theory exposed :)

Later edit: the last word I used, exposed might sound more conspiracy-ish than what I meant to say. I guess it was a false friend of a romanian word i was thinking about at the time: 'expus' which means on display, laid out.

The scenario I laid out is an opinion that came to mind when constantly reflecting on the bulletpoints listed above.