Whales Have to Think Differently
You might think being a whale would be fun... Being a responsible whale is not fun. It's a job; a job that pays less than if you're irresponsible. (in the short term)
When you're a whale, you shouldn't be trying to acquire more stake. You already have too much stake. The coin is centralized around you and it's your job to help decentralize the project. It's your job to find other people who want to add value to the community and pay them for it. It is often a thankless job that requires a lot of hours. For every one person you make happy there are 100 others that will call you out for corruption.
Why I'm Hoping To Become A Whale In STEEMLEO
This post really concerned me and got me thinking about this whole topic. @videosteemit is already a SteemLeo whale. We both are; we both control full percents of the total coin count. For him to say he wants to be a whale concerns me slightly, so I responded:
Are you saying you want to own 500,000 LEO? That would be 1/8th of all tokens in existence. That's way to much for a single account to have. The centralization involved there would devalue the platform.
Everyone is judging what a minnow, dolphin, orca, whale is on these new platforms using Steem's metrics. Steem has over 300 million coins... PALNet has like 15 million and SteemLEO only has 3.8 million. The percentages and ratios here are magnitudes away from how Steem operates.
If you want to be a whale on #steemleo you only need 6000 coins. I'm a whale x3.7; @videosteemit is a whale x4.2
Less is More
No one should want to be a whale. Imagine if 1 million individual people all had a distributed stake in Steem. That's only like 320 coins per person. Do you realize how much a Steem coin would be worth in this scenario with that much decentralization? Hundreds if not thousands of dollars per coin.
Not only would the value of coins skyrocket in the face of decentralization, but the centralization caused by DPOS would be greatly negated. All of a sudden you'd have a situation where the witnesses could easily be held accountable for a shitty action rather than be propped up permanently by a few accounts.
Alas, decentralization takes time; it's certainly an "easier said than done" situation. However, Steem's tipping model makes it a lot easier to accomplish the goal. Rather than having to sell coins on the open market and hope they won't all get bought up by the same person, every upvote is an intelligent mini-airdrop to an account that hopefully wants to bring more value to the platform than they leech from it.
... Comes Great Responsibility
I can see the paradigm shift on the horizon.
Cryptocurrency is smart money.
That smart money is currently pretty dumb, but it keeps learning.
In the future the most responsible and trustworthy people are going to be the ones who are entitled with the most stake. Smart money is going to target them and the world will be vastly better off for it. Chances are, you aren't going to want to be a whale in the future. When artificial scarcity is eliminated from the planet and everyone is living in abundance, why would you want more money? That's just extra work for you. Let someone else do that job. You'd rather be doing XYZ.
If you want to be a whale (I do) then you're living in scarcity surrounded by scarcity.
People who want positions of power are often the least deserving of them. Remember that, because the blockchain is immortalizing all your actions in the annals of history.
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