Where's the catch?

Todays post will go a little differently, instead of sharing what I know or learned I'll ask a couple questions to which I don't know the answer. I'll try to think of possible answers, but don't let that fool you into thinking that I'm talking about facts. If my possible answers sound concerned, don't read too much into that, I probably simply don't know enough to judge the situation appropriately, even if there's a chance I stumble upon a flaw or problem that actually exists. At any point you're very welcome to correct me in the comments! Got it? Alright, let's begin.

Question: What happens when you're the most reputable user of the entire community?

So I was told that you gain reputation for contributing to the community and that you can lose reputation when your posts are being flagged by someone with more reputation than you. But does that mean that once you're the most reputable user you're completely untouchable? In that case there could be possible cases of abuse: Imagine a real super villain, making good posts and rising up to the very top of the reputable users, once at the very top the villain reveals his true evil intentions and uses the Steem platform in the worst way you can imagine! Because the villain has the highest reputation no one in the community can bring down his reputation through flagging his posts. The villain is actually so evil, that the rest of the Steemians come up with a plan to save the platform: They concentrate all their power and upvote someone to become the hero with more reputation than the villain to finally bring him down. The villain however will do the best he can to stop that, flagging every post of the hero to keep his reputation lower than his!

Is this scenario possible? Can one become untouchable and could they keep everyone else down to remain untouchable? It's an unlikely scenario to begin with, but I suppose it doesn't hurt thinking about every possibility! On to the next question.

Question: If a group of two or more users were to always upvote each others posts regardless of their quality for their own gain in Steem currency, could they succeed?

Let's not lie, some people on this nice planet are really greedy and can simply never get enough money. They will exploit everything and everyone regardless of the consequences for everyone else. But could they abuse Steem purely for its monetary value? What keeps someone from buying a lot of Steem Power and team up with others to upvote each other in a never ending circle solely to make a huge profit? I know that there's a limit on your voting power, regenerating partially each day and that there is only a set amount of Steem currency generated each day, but are there enough counter measures in place to prevent such obviously abusive cases? If they want to cash out all the value their accounts have they need 13 weeks of powering down to turn all their Steem Power into tradable currency. I would assume that waiting period is in place to make it harder to 'pull a quick one' but can they even be stopped at that point? And what consequences would this have for everyone else?

Even when you put a lot of though into a system, there's always the possibility someone finds out its weakness, possible angles to attack from. I don't think any system is completely safe from being gamed, but how safe is Steem and how exploitable are the edge cases? And most importantly in what way would the fair players be affected by this? Moving to the next and final question for today.

Question: Should it be possible to buy power to begin with?

Money is power, literally if you go by the rules of Steem. But doesn't that come with all kinds of problems? Shouldn't content rise to the top and get the highest exposure because it's good rather than because someone bought a ton of Steem Power to bring the content they want to see in the top up? I mean on one hand it's great if people buy Steem currency because that's what keeps it valuable as a currency, but should the richest people be the ones who get to decide what everyone else gets to see at the very top of the page? Mainstream media can shape and form the opinions of a lot of people and while I'd say Steem is far from being mainstream there might be a time in the future when it is, and at that point there would be a lot of people interested in seeing their posts on the very top. I guess in the end it's not much different to advertising and lobbying, which we already have plenty of in other areas, but isn't that what we're trying to get away from? Single people being in charge of everything?

The obvious answer here would be, that the block chain should provide enough clarity to see when something like this happens. Steemit or a developer of any other tool to view the block chain could easily filter out the influence of someone guilty of abusing their power or even program an automated solution. But that would be censorship, right? Would that make it wrong or would that be comparable with someone using an ad-blocker in their web browser? Should there be done something about someone with a lot of money advertising whatever they want on this platform, possibly disguised as a regular post? At what point would that become enough of a problem to justify actions against it by the developers writing the tools to view the content?

Thanks for reading, and if you have answers or if I made a mistake you'd like to point out you're more than welcome to do so in the replies! My enthusiasm for this platform is as high as ever, those are simply some questions which have been going through my mind and which I have to think about and research more.