As I understand it there are 47 whales, I may be wrong
I don't know how many 'whales' there. The cutoff between whale and non-whale seems pretty arbitrary to me. For example, when I look at my votes received on steemdb:
- I'm only receiving about 30-40 GV worth of votes individually weighted more than 1 GV (that's about 500k SP), and 30-40 GV is not nearly enough to get voted in as top 20.
- The rest come from a very long tail of smaller votes that seem drawn from a fairly continuous distribution (indeed the entire set of votes seems to come from a continuous distribution, other than maybe the top few worth only around 20 GV), not one with distinct categories of 'whales' and 'non-whales'.
So, yes SP matters and if you want to have voting influence you will need to buy SP or earn SP, but the idea that only 47 whales' votes matter is wrong.