Nice post, at first glance I would agree that this could be a concern. However I do feel I that ultimately it is not too big of a deal. Reason being, the top Steemians and quite honestly making way TOO MUCH money on this platform. Of course they are going to be taking some profits. Steem is still just in "beta" and believe me I am trying to get my Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter etc friends to switch over, but what is happening is they sign up, spend some time putting nice well thought out posts out there, and quite honestly get completely ignored. It is very easy to see how many people have even looked at your post. Generally it is between 0 and 2 for your first 10 posts, and you are lucky to get a single "upvote" - so what is happening? They stop logging in and go right back to Facebook, where a photo of your cat gets over 100 likes. It just feels better people, money or not. I personally am going to hang in there as a growing minnow Steemian and continue bumping up my status and increase followers and hopefully corresponding "upvotes" and SP payouts etc - I am not in this entirely for the money, but a small bump here or there does feel good. What we have here is an environment where literally 5% of Steemians are raking in 95% or more of the money - of course they will take some profits!!! Yes sure they mostly have very intelligent useful content they bring with their posts, and very many of them are bringing a lot of their previous YouTube followers over, meaning they are already sort of famous in whatever subject matter they focus on. In my opinion, for Steem to survive in the long run, they need to level out the playing field, at least a little bit, and help welcome and reward new users in some way so they do not immediately lose interest, and bail... never to return. And I think Steem needs to simplify the currency process a bit as well. 99.5 of the population still simply glazes over when the subject of "Crypto Currency" comes up. Nobody gets it yet!!! And you get over here, and there is regular Steem, Steem Power, Steem Dollars, and Savings - what??? And you need to already own some BTC or other crypto to convert over... to which one??? Hmmmm this weeds out 95% of folks right away. The general public just doesn't know WTF to do with this, let's not kid ourselves, it is confusing. So I do believe in the the Steem Platform and truly want to see it succeed, but as for the whales taking profits?? Not surprising at all. @evanrvoss, thank you very much for your great content. I am upvoting you, following you and will resteem this post. I wish you much success and hope to see you someday looking at my minnow postings as well @cryptoted, so we can all collectively grow into a future successful Social Media platform here at Steemit. Peace