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RE: How to fix downvoting: a set of proposals for a solution
The problem here is the well-monied hostile actor problem. They don't care about locking the cash away, that's not their goal. This would actually make that threat much, much worse.
This assumes there will not be well-monied beneficial actors who more than even it out. Hostile actors would not be able to significantly harm the system though because others could similartly power up to help mitigate against it.
If Bob has 1 billion dollars in whalepower and is hostile toward the system, and John has 1 billion whalepower used to reward top content creation guilds who I have helped create by watering them and providing them with more resources, John would have an army of content producers who earn steemusd. If bob attacks effectively and harms the value of the steem token, these armies of people are going to collectively earn and store more Steembacked dollars than bob. They all buy Steem and power it up to get more steempower (not even whalepower) as they watch the hostile actor's strength in the ecosystem wane over time. Why? Because after even a successful attack on the network like this, the hostile will have had their account outed (and it isn't like they could transfer whalepower to another account), which will mean the accounts reputation will be Horrible and all serious steem users will know them and most will actively work to ensure they can never effectively pull off attacks again. John will have an army of people paying him out with numerous smaller tx's while they will ignore the attacker. And the attacker will not have the power again unless they are willing to buy/earn more steem to lock away forever (aka burn).
There are lots of supervillains, only one batman. History and game theory do not support your analysis. Do not depend on peoples good nature.
Put another way, do you know anyone who is willing to put ~1 billion dollars into steem just to moderate it? The truth is great powers don't really cancel each other out. They are like two big waves coming together - maybe the sea is calm afterwards but anything in between just got blown to splinters.
People and institutions are semi-rational actors. They will work together and oppose each other depending on their goals. The USA, China, Russia, and many, many other governments have shown they are all interested in suppressing speech of different kinds.
Basically: There is NO ONE on earth who can oppose that level of force financially and they would be assassinated if they tried.
Again: you cannot depend on the existence of "good" or "neutral" parties (if such a thing truly exists) but only on things that are contractually enforced by the algorithm. The moment people and power are involved, everything goes out the window.
Furthermore, the system would likely aid these forces for rational reasons. If all these powers were to "buy in" in order to manipulate/suppress news, then the value of steem would rise as these huge buy orders came in. It would be a massive cash cow. The vast majority of users would benefit in the short term, but in the long term the system would now be held ransom by the very forces many are here to avoid.
But just like the stock market, current shareholders would LOVE a massive (and ongoing) spike from such markets because they would get wealthy off of it - just like bitcoin holders have seen the value skyrocket due to capital fleeing China.