Well, there you have it. The bus was at the stop for about two seconds, and the driver pretty much just open and shut the door before taking off.

"Building a decentralized economic platform that uses voting to distribute funds is extremely challenging. On the one hand everyone wants to “vote selfishly” to give themselves the most reward possible, on the other hand large stake holders want to vote in a manner that maximizes the value of the currency.

The solution employed by Steem uses the principle that individuals acting alone shouldn’t have much power, but the more people that work together the more power they have collectively. In other words, two people voting together is more than twice as powerful as either voting alone.

The end result is a system that is working relatively well at today’s scale. The challenge Steem faces now is that large stakeholders, aka whales, have enough stake to unilaterally allocate far more than even the largest group of smaller users.

This means that whales need to spread their votes across 1000 times as much content as normal users or refrain from voting all together. Allocation of rewards will be highly concentrated among those the whales give attention to, but the attention of whales is finite. The finite limits of whale attention limits the scalability of reward distribution."