How's that minnow power working out?

Benicents is a new company being formed with the express purpose of bringing people from outside the crypto-ecosystem directly into the steem ecosystem.

Our goal is to find ways to make steem understandable and appealing to the 99% of people who've never even heard of cryptocurrency!

As you can tell from our name, most of what we look at is how crypto can benefit people's lives. There are several projects we've been considering since learning of steem a couple years ago.

However all of our plans are cruxed on the idea that there is an equitable distribution of power within the platform, at least in the general sense.

That is to say, our ideas really only work if the will of the many can outweigh the will of the few.

The reason this is true is because our use cases are dependent upon the same concepts of personal validation and prestige that are mentioned in the original steem blue paper.

Let's face it, if you feel like you have no say, no voice, no one listening, then you'll pack it in and go home quick. Well most people will anyways.

So I wrote a small program to produce a periodic report to see if this condition exists yet. We checked this out a year ago and the numbers still weren't there.
But I'm proud to say that it appears to be the case now.

The program is simple. We examine the top 100 posts in trending, we order them by expected payout then we sum the total vote weight for each voter. Example if someone has 1000000 rshares and a 2000 (20%) then we count them as 200000 towards the total. Then we take that 200000 and divide it by the cumulative total thereby producing a percentage contribution.

We do this twice, the first time includes only the first 25 voters of each post in the top 100 trending posts. The second time includes all voters on those same posts.

Truncated to First 25

NAME	Percent
@upmewhale	%2.8817
@tipu	%2.0350
@ranchorelaxo	%1.5442
@smooth	%1.0706
@blocktrades	%0.9235
@trafalgar	%0.8480
@bdvoter	%0.8175
@rocky1	%0.7435
@steemyoda	%0.7175
@canadian-coconut	%0.6274
total	%12.2089

As you can see, when you only take into account the first 25 people to vote, 10 people dominate, handing out a cumulative 12.21% of the rewards. This is to be expected and considering the average number of votes in total, this 12.21% isn't that far from our ideal of the top 10 being responsible for 10% of the rewards.

But what happens if we dilute it by factoring in all votes of all people who voted on the top 100 posts in trending?

All Votes

NAME	Percent
@ranchorelaxo	%0.4288
@steemhunt	%0.3382
@fundition	%0.3342
@steemzzang	%0.3029
@sct.krwp	%0.2634
@bdvoter	%0.2417
@smooth	%0.2416
@steemed-proxy	%0.2232
@blocktrades	%0.2084
@oracle-d	%0.2053
total	%2.7878

The total number of voters who contributed more than 0% of the rewards was 8324, but the chart above limits it to those who contributed more than 0.0001% of total rewards on the top 100 trending posts and that number is 2414.

As you can see from the above, the 2389 voters who are not in the top 25 in weight were able to effectively dilute out in percentage contribution terms, several of the larger whales. The top 10 now only contribute a cumulative 2.79% vs 12.21% in the more restricted sense.

Doing it with all 8324 factored in, the picture changes yet again, but not as dramatically.

This means that you as a minnow or dolphin finally have as much power collectively as even the largest whales, so long as you're working towards a common goal.

Translation: You finally have the power to bring about the steem that you want to see.

This also means there has never been a better time to bring new folks to the platform!

Stay tuned over the next few months as we build some innovative things on top of it.

This post is 100% SteemPowered!