Warning this post contains mostly questions, with the hope to getting a dialog going about the problems, if infact there are problems, with the wealth distribution in Steemit.
Is there a problem?
There is always going to be an unbalance in wealth and it is arguable what distribution is healthy, let's take a large industrial country like the UK they have a distribution where the top 10% own 45% of the wealth. Compare that to Steemit where 10% own 99.3%.
Will the problem self correct?
Again from steemwhales if we look at the top 100 users by estmated value, we can see that 36% of them have less than 100 lifetime posts. I am going to use that as an unscientific cut off and say, due to the built in inflation, that these accounts will be losing value at a higher rate than the average steemit user that is posting and voting regularly.
But the main reason I see referenced to how the problem will self correct is 'As new users come to the site they will buy more Steem and better distribute the system'. Some problems I see with this is, firstly, new users are coming from outside crypto and are not confident enough with bitcoin to buy Steem and, more importantly to this discussion, they are put off by the wealth distribution so do not want to invest.
If my second observation is correct and new users are scared off by the inequality, then steemit has a bit of a paradox. We need new users to invest to redistribute wealth but they will not invest while the wealth is held by so few.
Would whales be willing to give up wealth
As I am not a whale I can't answer this, but I will point out that whales do not have all the wealth it seems they have. Mainly because there is not a big enough market for Steem yet, if a whale/s tried to sell 250,000 Steem, which is the current market depth of polo's order book, the whale/s would receive $125,000 instead of the estimated $400,000.
So the $217,407,000 held by the top 10% or probably more importantly the $200,000,000 held by the top 1% is only paper value at the moment unless Steemit grows a significant amount. If a redistribution of wealth is needed I would hazard a guess that the whales would be happy to participate for the good of the ecosystem which is to say for their own good.
Are there any ideas for redistribution?
Only 2,700 characters in and I finally get to the main reason for this post, are there plans or discussions for this in place? If so where? I would love to participate. Have my other concerns been proven unfounded, making a need for a redistribution plan unnecessarily?
Thanks for reading and I look forward to hear some of thoughts of the community