RE: My proposal: reduce the withdraw channel from 104 weeks to 104 days or even 104 hours to make steemit less like a ponzi scheme
Whales are not one homogeneous well policed group that makes decisions as a quorum. Whales are individual, independent selfish rational economic agents. Even if 99% of the whales were doing the right thing and holding their stake, there would still be a more short term minded selfish 1% that would be dumping, and it's that 1% who would reap all the rewards of everyone else's effort. Since every whale is aware of that, and everyone prefers being in the 1% who are selfish rather than the 99% who are being screwed by the 1%, everyone acts selfishly. That's a known behavioral / game theoretic phenomenon called the tragedy of the commons. The only way to avoid that is to design the rules of the system in such a way that stake holders best interests are always aligned regardless of their short or long time preference, and always lead them to safeguard and nurture the common resources (here liquidity and user satisfaction). That's what @ned and @dan are trying to do by tweaking the rules, with lukewarm results so far.