Thanks for the upvote and resteem, Hive account@mitneb. I really appreciate it!

Let me try to explain this in more detail, as explaining it helps me to understand better.

Steem power is essentially "committed" steem which is used to demonstrate a "proof of stake" in the community. The idea is that malicious users could manipulate the system if they were allowed to have a large influence in upvoting, without having a definite stake in the system as a whole.

By committing an amount of steem to steem power, a user can demonstrate that they intend that their actions on the steemit platform benefit the community as a whole, rather than just themselves.

For this reason, the amount that any one user can "pay" another user through upvoting (or other methods I don't fully understand yet) is proportional to the amount of steem power they are holding.

Now... steem power can be attained by earning steem through content creation and curation, and then converting it to steem power. Steem power can also be traded for another cryptocurrency. This also allows for a user to simply "buy in" to the level of stake/influence they wish to have in the community.

Using tools like https://steemwhales.com/ can help users visualize other users' activity and wallet data. By clicking on the column entitled "Steem Power" you can see the rankings of users according to that metric.

Now if you look down at the bottom of the page you can also see this stat: "Steemians Tracked: 181994"

Therefore, we know that anybody above ranking #18119 is in the top 10%. Anybody above ranking #1819 is in the top 1% , and so on. Then- looking up those rankings on steemwhales, we can determine roughly where the "cutoff" is for various arbitrarily assigned tiers.

TL;DR Any user with 50 or more SP is in the top 10% of users holding steem power. Any user with 3000 or more SP is in the top 1%.

Does that make more sense now? Please feel free to ask any additional questions! :-)