I appreciate your substantive reply. Pakman appeared on some MSP radio interviews, and did attempt to engage on Steem, but gave up. He hasn't not tried it.

"Well this is obviously not true, but I'm going to assume you mean a large portion of the stake is in the hands of whales."

No. It is literally true that the whales hold the vast majority of stake. Every bit of Steem in existence was mined, and all of it that has been sold to others or created via inflation is a small percentage of it. I suggest doing some research on the matter, starting from the initial ninjamine that was very offensive to many in the crypto community. Steemd will reveal who has mined stake, and further exploration of who holds stake, such as statistics from @arcange (image below from his post today) will reveal that the vast majority of stake is concentrated in only a few dozen hands. Some of those ninjaminers have thousands of accounts. It's possible that the majority of accounts are owned by whales, in fact.

We have, in the past, got thousands of signups per day. Almost 100% of those new accounts were abandoned due to the rampant profiteering stake weighting enabled the whales to undertake, and the flagging of those that protest such into complete invisibility. Steemit itself is now completely censoring many accounts (almost all held by one person, @fulltimegeek), and although that doesn't prevent information posted by those accounts from remaining on the blockchain, almost no one can see it because Steemit runs the nodes and publishes the APIs many frontends such as Steempeak use, and very few people use frontends or apps that do show such content. Github reveals this fact with the irredeemable's list. You can ascertain these facts for yourself.

This graph shows the distribution of Steem Power cumulated per account level.
The grey portion of each column indicates unused Steem Power by inactive accounts (see above for the definition of inactive).

You can see that whales directly hold most of the Steem today, and once you realize that most of them have many accounts, or 'socks'/bots, most of the dolphins and orcas are also accounts held by the same people that hold the whale accounts. The vast majority of Steem is held by those individuals, through their multiple accounts.

HF21 is going to more than halve author rewards within the week. IMHO, this is a very poor time to be onboarding masses, who will be extremely prone to abandoning Steem in short order as HF21 makes all the reasons user retention is awful far worse.

In a couple weeks the falling price, market cap, and decline in users will prove I am right, or prove I am wrong by not. We'll see if Steem is ready for mass onboarding or not. I'll be very happy if I'm wrong, as I want Steem to fulfill it's potential to change the world. I don't think it will until profiteering based on stake weighting is abandoned, and capital gains becomes the focus of ROI by investors.

We'll see.