Unaccounted votes, a great idea, and questions about how big a whale to become...

It turns out Steemit is a multifaceted site, in the sense that there are aspects of it that feel more like work and other aspects of it that feel more like R&R. And I can see those aspects vary from user to user. Because of that it doesn't make as much sense as I thought it would for me to designate all weekends as "time off" from Steemit. It's one thing to plan to be off because I'm taking a retreat at the local monastery, or in observance of the most important time of the year for Roman Catholics. It's another to have nothing major going on during the weekend and just decide it will be a weekend without Steemit.

This weekend I didn't want a break from Steemit, per se. I just wanted a break from the work of curating, and by that I mean carefully keeping track of the category of each upvote I make, and also making a point to vote within certain categories. I did vote over the weekend, but I didn't record it or really pay attention to the category. I cast a whole lot of unaccounted votes, and I enjoyed doing it too.

With that said, I still want to keep track of my votes and I still want to make sure I cast a certain amount of them for small minnows using the wantwiserupvote tag and other small minnows who introduce themselves on Steemit.

Earlier today I had a major Aha! moment about my strategy. Since I started thinking in terms of number of votes I get over the course of a week, why not account for my votes weekly instead of daily? That idea seemed so obvious, like duh!, that I'm amazed it took me this long to come up with it. Maybe it was the Habanero peppers and hot sauce I didn't actually eat and drink while hanging out with @Papa-Pepper that cleared my brain. However it was that this brilliant idea came to be, I'm going to run with it this next week. Rather than tallying my votes up on a daily basis, I will tally them up over the entire week. Below you can see the blank chart for the upcoming week, with each category's voting goals for the week in the upper left corner.

This is great news for anyone who has gotten bored with my daily How wiser voted posts. I'll still make those posts, only weekly instead of daily.

Moving on to the question of the day: how big a whale should wiser become?

On Friday, I got into a comment chat with Hive account@freebornangel about what actually happens to minnow influence when the really big whales vote full strength. I'm no math whiz and there's some pretty high level math underlying the various algorithms that run Steemit, but my understanding is that the top Steemit accounts have so much Steem Power that when they exercise their influence it's so much bigger than most of the other users' influence that it basically drowns everyone else's influence out, and there's really very little that can be done to mitigate that without causing all kinds of other problems. The closest analogy I can think of is the Actor's Guild. There's this organization that all American actors are part of. It's kind of a requirement to get acting jobs. This association keeps statistics on how much actors earn and they will tell you that the average yearly salary for an actor is around a thousand Dollars. So let's say I want to dabble in acting. I'm not interested in getting rich doing it, but I'd like to at least earn enough to cover the expenses. I look at this average and I think, wow, a thousand dollars a year, that's pretty good. So I hang up my shingle as an actor and start flying around the country auditioning for parts. Then it hits me (perhaps after a year or two of earning absolutely nothing) that this $1,000 yearly average is highly skewed by the very few actors who are earning 25 million dollars on a single film. If you remove those extreme high earners, the average drops to more like a couple bucks a year, something I might have wanted to understand before I started putting money into airfare and such. I think that's more or less what happens with the influence on Steemit, and why when the big whales cast their full strength votes, the small, medium, and large minnows get their own influence drowned out.

None of this is intended to in any way cast judgment on the big whales. They got to where they are by taking a big risk on Steem and from the looks of it they won big time. That's awesome and I wouldn't want to take any of that away from them. After spending some time looking at the top accounts on SteemWhales and comparing those holdings to the total Steem supply per CoinMarketCap, I see that the issue is simply that the big whales own too high a percentage of the Steem currency. To keep the math simple, let's say there's a total supply of 250 million Steem (that's pretty close to the actual total supply). So if a big whale has 2.5 million Steem Power, that means he or she owns one percent of the total Steem supply. There are a few accounts which have closer to two or three percent of the total supply. Imagine what it would be like to be sitting on two or three percent of the US Dollar supply.

I don't know exactly where the line is, but there comes a point where if you own too much of the supply of a currency weird things start to happen. At the extreme end, let's say you launched a coin but you insisted on owning all of it. Well, in that case it would never go anywhere and it would be worthless. So you decide you'll only keep 50% of it and distribute the rest so that people can buy it and sell it. Most people would agree that owning 50% of the money supply is still too much. But what about three percent, two percent, one percent? It seems that on Steemit that is still too much. So, what about 0.1 percent or thereabouts? Would that be too much?

The bottom line that I would like to know is where exactly is that line that I do not want to cross in terms of having too much Steem Power. I definitely want to become a whale who has real influence here on Steemit, but it is not my dream to drown out all the minnows. I want to use my influence and feel good about it. So, what would be a reasonable goal for how much Steem Power to accumulate? Once I reach that amount, I would then make sure to sell off any excess.

My first goal is to get to 20,000 SP. I don't think that amount is going to be a problem, so no worries there. But beyond that, how much is just right, and how much is really too much?

My voting power is growing again (recovering from my unaccounted votes) and should be right at 100% when I begin officially curating for the next week. I will keep track and I will keep you posted on how it goes. I'll also check out my rank and reputation score at the end of next week. Stay tuned...