Coming from you, this is high praise indeed! Thank you very much! I mean that.

To be fair, I haven't been a coder for many, many years. Though like a fish with a bicycle, you never forget the sweet, sweet sensation of finally getting something to work.

At this point I'm trying to decide if this is an artifact of the reward mechanics in the blockchain white paper and thus implemented or an inevitable result of any kind of reward-system which has few outlets and thus most of the ecological energy must be turned inward to generate more of itself. That is, largely, what we have in steem. There are a few ways to take the actual currency out of the system profitably and many ways to use the currency within the system to simply get more currency, whether it be self-voting, or engaging with bots, or lend/leasing delegation power – which can lead to just making more steem and thus more vests.

A lot of these really large accounts have existed since the primordial days, as far as I can tell.

It might also be interesting to poke at the Operations collection and simply get a list of accounts which have made any sort of operation in the last year, for instance, build a vests table out of that, and see what the distribution looks like. That would be one more lens to bring to bear on looking at how money is moving on the blockchain.

Like I said, I am no kind of business analyst. Never have been. But I do have some interesting questions from time to time.

Again, thank you for the praise. It's super effective!