In a comment on this post by @gavett I mentioned that I think the n^2 voting power rule is too extreme and serious thought should be given to changing it to something more reasonable like n^1.1. I would like to try to demonstrate how extreme this is with some back-of-the-envelope calculations of how much more powerful a whale is than someone who has invested (by earning it or by turning bitcoin into Steem Power) a significant amount of money (let's say $1,000) and powered it up into SP. Clearly such a person has a commitment to the platform and their influence should be recognized right? Let's see how their investment stacks up to some of the larger accounts here.
This is exactly how it is supposed to work based on the Steem Whitepaper. But, you have to wonder if this is a good strategy going forward given the fact that there are many accounts with over one million SP.
Is this not a bit too extreme? Might we not see more investment from new users if they could reasonably achieve some influence without investing a million dollars?
In case you're not very familiar with powers of 10, here's a YouTube tutorial (credit for this goes to the tutorial authors on YouTube).
Are you less than a Minnow? Less than a Krill? #lessthankrill
This is based on info found in Google searches and such. I kind of hope I'm wrong here but ... seems plausible that, forget Minnows - new users could be one one thousandth as "important" than 
The main argument for a non-linear voting function seems to be that it can help discourage the creation of fake accounts because people will be incentivized to instead grow their main account since doing so makes more sense when your voting power is higher by doing so. OK, fair enough. However, any function which always increases and does so faster than a linear function would achieve this goal. Why does it have to be n^2? Why not e.g. n^1.1, or possibly some function that favors accounts reaching a certain size, but not accounts which are too large (e.g. something like n^1.1 in the beginning, but transitioning to something like log(n) later).
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Bryan Gmyrek [verification post] lives in sunny Arizona with his wife, three sons, and two golden puppies. He earned a Ph.D. in physics for his work at Fermilab and also enjoys computers, nature photography and blockchains.