"... self voting is the most profitable thing to do and getting rid of it won't solve the problem as people can just make multiple accounts to vote themselves. The second major problem is that curation is basically asking someone to give away 75% of their potential earnings because someone did something and if we can accept that value is subjective, then it's only logical that the thing the person did doesn't provide enough value to the other person to make them voluntarily give up resources that they could give themselves."

This is easily avoided by preventing rewards from being capable of supporting profiteering. Leaving rewards open-ended is just asking profiteers to extract them. According to my last look at @arcange's posts that detail such matters daily, the median payout is .1 SBD, while the average payout is 15 times that. That is the difference between organic curation and profiteering.

Using an algorithm to limit payouts to some reasonable multiple of the median (I have suggested Huey Long's proposal of 3% to 300%, which leaves two orders of magnitude for incentive for higher quality content, but any reasonable limitation works, such as .5% and 500% - as long as some incentive for newbs remains, and less than ~10 SBD at the top end, to prevent nominal rewards from being extractable by profiteers) will make rewards an unsuitable vector for profiteering. Whales aren't going to spend any time creating vast hordes of bots to vote up vast fleets of botposts to attain nominal returns on their stake.

Since content creators will be rewarded ~15 times more for their content (eliminating profiteering off rewards will pump the median up to the average, or close) they'll be far more rewarded for their content than they are now. Posts such as this one which is very highly rewarded would receive much less Steem, but still become popular, due to their quality. Folks that are determined to provide financial incentives to posts like this one that merit more can simply use the memospam technique that resteemers use now to tip. PAL and other SE or SMT coins can also be added to the mix, without changing Steem rewards.

Most of your posts don't earn this much, and even my own would probably halve in value. That's ok by me, because of the following.

Ending profiteering - the extraction of business returns before they can increase the value of the underlying investment vehicle (traditionally stock, but in this case the Steem token) will enable that value to inure the the token. Steem price will rise, and investors intent on capital gains will be able to buy Steem for that purpose, without needing to become serial self voters to gain ROI. While the amount of Steem payout on posts will remain within the range determined by algorithm, the value of the Steem may well skyrocket, and the actual financial rewards received by creators will do the same.

Curation rewards are nothing but incentive to profiteer. Uncountable platforms exist that aren't monetized, and folks upvote content based solely on their subjective evaluations. No financial incentive is necessary to drive actual curation. In fact, financial incentive is counterproductive to actual curation - the subjective determination that content is deserving of an upvote - and replaces it with incentive to extract financial rewards. This incentive can be manipulated all you want, but as long as financial incentive is extant, it will remain incentive to profiteer, rather than curate. IMHO, curation rewards should be eliminated as counterproductive to creating incentive to create good content, and allow curation to be the reason for upvotes.

Those that will remark that this leaves no reason for anyone to invest in Steem, or hold it, simply are unaware that capital gains has been a nominal incentive to invest in enterprises since before history began. It works fine, and also encourages investors to seek to increase the value of the investment vehicle, in this case Steem. Every mechanism that encourages extracting that value prior to it inuring to the token discourages capital gains, and the history of Steem demonstrates exactly this dynamic, as Steem continually falls in CMC. Investors know that profiteering prevents Steem from increasing in price by extracting that value prior to capital gains occurring, and invest in other tokens, despite Steem being one of the best blockchains in the world, and having once been the only cryptocurrency with the most valuable business model/use case in the world, social media.

Whales aren't going to spend their days consuming content on the whole, because they have other business interests they tend to. That's why they have the funds to buy enough Steem to be a whale. The ninjaminers that hold most of the stake today don't have it because they were savvy investors, but clever devs that either created the ninjamine, or lucked into it and managed to mine stake before Steemit even existed. This is probably why the extraction mechanisms exist: because they weren't coded by experienced investors, but clever devs without prior investment experience.

Even though their profiteering will be impaired, the buy ins by investors will likely reward them far more, because it will be the value of their stakes that provide most of the capital gains. It will be their stakes that investors buy to invest.

No one will benefit more from capital gains than extant whales.

I will be curious to see how PAL fares while riding on the Steem blockchain.

Thanks!