Adjusting curation rates does nothing to secure the witnesses from a Sybil attack that takes only money to execute, and offers a golden parachute to those that mined most of the Steem in existence today.
My suggestion is not meant to secure the blockchain, it's meant to distribute rewards more widely and support new users.
Large SP holders won't benefit more than they already do, like i demonstrated in OP, whales are already profiting fully. Even if whales would earn more from such feature, it still wouldn't be a problem because distribution will be much fairer. The real problem is whales profiting while preventing minnows to grow which is exactly what is happening currently.
You are exactly correct, but I do not agree that whales are 'profiting fully'.
As I pointed out a couple months ago during the furor when we first talked about this, whales can expect far higher gains from appreciation in the price of Steem than they can from mining the rewards pool.
At the time BTC was ~$3k. I pointed out that if you bought Steem at ~$1, if Steem went to only 1% of BTC price, the gain would be ~3000%, far more than you can generate from selling votes, delegating SP, or any other profiteering mechanism dependent on mining the rewards pool.
Steem is a better crypto than BTC, and Steemit CAN be a social media platform that becomes the Gorilla King in the space - but it won't as long as the rewards are mined by profiteers.
Simply mitigating the profiteering can but delay the inevitable.
If Steemit doesn't just end profiteering and just allow capital gains to reward investors, another platform will, sooner or later.
Profit is an inherent part of steemit. Users are supposed to upvote good content early in order to profit the most. That's what curation is about according to the white paper. I don't know why you want to end profit, that's the only thing that makes this site different.
I get your point about the value of steem, but I'm not sure investors wanting to profit from the site has a negative impact on the price. Users who want to profit have to stay powered up thus contributing to the price increase. For example I have not powered down a single cent in almost a year now.
The fact that the trending page is the same every day and that the retention rate is poor is the real concern to me and my 'proposal' addresses this.
The issue is not people wanting profit but the fact that users have to act against the platform's best interest to make the most money.
Incentives needs to be realigned so that people can profit while upvoting the things they like and contributing positively to the site.
I don't find profiting and profiteering to be the same thing, and I did try to point out that traditional capital gains are the victims of profiteering, as much as are new users.
In the white paper a discussion of financial manipulation points out that mining the rewards pool will harm the platform, and indeed, suggests that flagging/downvoting is the mechanism intended to prevent this.
As it happens, that didn't work as they said it was supposed to.
I hope you do feel that I am not desirous - at all - of insulting you, or anyone that acts to responsibly attend to financial matters. I'm not.
As you say, it is just a matter of properly aligning incentives. I just feel that as long as VP is weighted by SP, there is an incentive to seek to maximize ROI through voting strategies.
Profit from investments does not require stake weighted VP, as capital gains, when Steem's superb qualities as cryptocurrency bear fruit, will reward investors to higher degree than BTC, IMHO.