This is very interesting post as I can do quite some things with the numbers. But first a question, cause as newbie I don't even know the SP range power group. Can someone post a table?
First I see an increase of 74k inactive users. I hope this has to do with the definition of inactive? Otherwise steemit is losing users very, very quickly in only 15 days 😳.
I tried to figure out why whales lose VP. I can think of at least 2 things, first already mentioned they are powering down and cashing. Secondly, what about some of them (or even most) are voting bots or just receiving most of their reward via curation? Then the authors will always gain more.
I would love to see these numbers again within a few months.
Red fish under 500 SP
Minnow 500 SP
Dolphins 5000 SP
Orca 50K SP
Whale 500K SP
That is rough estimates since the levels are actually based upon MVests not SP, but it is close enough.
As for the loss of VP, it most certainly is one powering down, at least this move. This is going to happen from time to time. The second one you mentioned could be true. I havent look at the Whale list to see what percent of the Whales are bots. There is also the issue of delegation. I do not know what the system does with delegation. I believe if a Whale gives you 100K SP, it is still shown as the Whales, yet you benefit. So when @ned delegates a bunch of SP to Zappl (500K), he created another Whale but it is one that is using the SP to upvote users on that application..the same as D.Tube who got 1M SP.
So there are some things in place to spread the SP around.