Well, there is a simple way to do this that acknowledges that 3 billion people earn less than $3/day.

Those people can't buy influence. This clearly establishes that creating a system that intends for people to buy influence to somehow create a fair distribution is impossible. I would go further and say buying influence is antithetical to fairness.

After all, it's exactly the problem in government and finance today.

The only way to create a fair system is to decouple wealth and speech. Making influence a commodity guarantees that not only wealth will be inequitably distributed, but also speech.

Most new users on Steemit do not understand that this is the case, because they are told that Steemit rewards posters for posting. This is what they come for, and it's a bait and switch. To be honest, tell them what you just told me, Steemit is a place where you can buy influence. See if new users still come.

Those that do will not be taken aback when they discover the truth.

The only fair way to live up to the rhetoric that has driven Steemit growth is to let the value of posts and comments be set by curators that have an influence, an ability to direct reward, weighted only by their reputation.

All the timing tricks, vote spreading schemes, etc. are just veils that may hide the raw fact that the value of speech is able to be co opted by wealth through those methods.

The real value in the platform is that creators create content, and people discuss that content. Creating rewards that incentivize this behavior will grow Steemit and cause the value of Steem to rise.

The influence buying paradigm is antithetical to not only free speech, and just government, but Steemit. No weighting scheme can make it just.