Minnows pretending to be whales - The Game Theory of Steem, Part 6

Welcome back to the Game Theory of Steem!

As always, if you're just joining us, I encourage you to check out the rest of the series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5) to get a bit of background on where we are.

Also, I'm happy to report that my brother just joined Steem as @brownsgreens, take a look at his introduceyourself post!

The goal of the series is to analyze how people's strategic voting and posting can lead to weird, possibly-unexpected outcomes. We're looking a lot at incentives.

In this installment, we're going to ask (and answer) a very simple question: Could a bunch of minnows band together and exercise the same clout as a whale? Everybody here (at least all the minnows) are seeming pretty frustrated that it feels like you basically need to attract whale attention in order to get reasonable payouts on a post, because whale votes have a lot more influence than minnow votes. But what if instead of going and finding a whale, you could form a cartel of minnows?

(image credit Brandon Cole)

It should be clear to everyone that if you could band together enough minnows and have all of them vote on the same post, it would be the same as if a whale had voted on it.

How does minnow power compare to whale power?

Take a look at this chart that I pulled off of steemd.com last week:

It's just a tiny bit confusing if you haven't seen it before, so I'll walk through it step by step. This chart breaks all Steem accounts into 7 categories: "dust," "newbie," "user," and so on all the way up to "legend." See the MV column? MV stands for "megavests"; for our purposes, we can think of this as a proxy for the amount of Steem Power an account has. One MV currently equals about 257 Steem Power.

Here's how to read the chart:

1. Look at the row that says "newbie" or 0.01 MV.
2. The accts column tells us how many accounts have between 0.01 and 0.1 MV; at current rates that means between 2.57 and 25.7 Steem Power. See, there are over 32,000 "newbie" (or shall we say "minnow?") accounts!
3. The stake column tells us how much of the total Steem Power is owned by each type of user. So this says that minnows control only 0.45% of the total Steem Power.
4. On the other hand, the "legend" or whale accounts have over 64% of the total SP in just 45 accounts.

I'll tell you right now, this is not looking good for our hypothetical minnow-cartel. Why? Because your vote influence is proportional to your Steem Power, and 45 accounts control over half the Steem Power in existence!

First question: if all the minnows banded together, how powerful would they be?

This one is easy! We just need to look at Steemwhales.com and find a single account that controls about 0.45% of the total SP. There are some un-interesting details that I'll share in the comments if you want (in particular, we're looking at 0.45% of the SP that isn't controlled by @steemit), but here's the juicy bit: we can calculate that 0.45% of the total SP is 243,316 SP; then we search down the Steem Power rankings on Steemwhales.com and find that (as of this writing), @au1nethyb1 has just shy of 244,000 SP, as I show in this screenshot:

So there is our incredibly-unsatisfying answer: if all minnows banded together, they would only be as powerful as the 48th-largest account.

Bummer, dude. Let's try something else.

How many minnows would it take to be as powerful as a big whale, say @berniesanders?

Hopefully everybody has run into @berniesanders at some point; if he votes for you, let's just say you're in super good shape. He packs a lot of power in his votes, so why don't we take a trip to fairy-land and imagine that we could recruit an unlimited number of minnows to try and make it rain like @berniesanders does. Here is a screenshot including his stats:

According to steemwhales, @berniesanders has over 1.7 million SP; that's 7 times more than the little whale we looked at earlier. That means we'd need 7 times more minnows than currently exist to be as influential as @berniesanders.

Here's the second incredibly-unsatisfying answer: we would need roughly 237,000 minnows to impersonate @berniesanders. That is over 5 times as many accounts of any size that currently exist on Steem.

So, this is honestly pretty disappointing at the moment. But let's not get too depressed - the system is new, and already it looks like we're seeing the SP get distributed out a bit more equitably. If you look on steemd.com today, the minnows now control 0.47%, up 0.02 percentage points from last week. It's not a big increase (duh), but at least it's moving in the right direction

Many many thanks to @heimindanger and his Steemwhales.com; if you like the work he is doing, you should toss an upvote towards his latest post.