Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. (My fault, my greatest fault.) I thought if I read four-five weeks all about Steemit, all I could, I can understand this system and have my opinion. May be even criticize it. No, I can not, it is too complicated and changing all the time. 

For example, I read the [white paper](https://steem.io/steem-whitepaper.pdf), and I found the description of an exponential growing power reward system with a graph. (Page 16.) The **huge inequality** in the system seems to be intentional, the ideology for this is given by “Zipf’s Law” (and, perhaps, security concerns):
>”if we have a million items, then the most popular 100 will contribute a third of the total value, the next 10,000 another third, and the remaining 89,900 the final third”. 

Later I noticed that the system was changed, **now it is linear**, since June of 2017, the famous Hard Fork 19. That means, before this fork, whales had even much more power and were growing more quickly. ([An older post about this here.](https://steemkr.com/steem/@shenanigator/my-thoughts-on-the-steem-reward-curve) )
It is hard to find the exact informations because after the forks rules changed, and some Steemit-posts got obsolete. 
>If a minnow comes in without investment and starts screaming immediately that they are not earning after their first 5 posts, is that someone we want to retain?

– asked [@whatsup in a recent post](https://steemit.com/steemit/@whatsup/we-have-37-whales-and-129-615-redfish). But **why are crying the minnows**? Because official Steemit descriptions and the more optimistic users are saying, “you can earn here”, “proof of brain”, “we are rewarding quality content”. But the reality is different, it is more a “proof of money” (stake) system, than a proof of brain. Or, perhaps a mixture of the two cases. I don’t think to 50-50 percent. May be 70-30, 80-20, or 90-10? What do you think?
![14 minnows1Pixabay.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbveekUo1ZSN8tro5MWUuUCxCi6bcQ414gEH2c3pjFhPa/14%20minnows1Pixabay.jpg)
*(Photo: Pixabay.com, slightly altered)*
Back to the mentioned white paper again:
> There are two ways people can get involved with a crypto-currency community: they can buy in, or they can work in.

This buying in, and the big power of those who bought in with a lot of money, is not mentioned on many places. Mostly some critic-minded steemians are explaining this in their blogs. Minnows don’t notice it first, and so it is quite **natural when they are crying**. It is very annoying if you work some hours on a post and get 0,1 cents for it.
The long official [FAQ](https://steemit.com/faq.html) – upper right in the menu, all the minnows should read it, I did – isn’t giving all the practical advises either.

So, me, minnow, would like to stop posting about minnows and Steemit, and write something finally about investments, what I was coming for. I don’t like to be the expert solving problems of Steemit which wouldn’t even exist without Steemit...

If you are a **masochist, hardcore reader**, but whish to learn how experienced users are seeing the problems of Steemit, you can start for example [here]( https://steemit.com/steemit/@yallapapi/hey-steemit-whales-how-d-you-like-to-fix-all-of-steemit-s-problems-and-make-bank-by-doing-absolutely-nothing). 

Lighter reading, because written in my pitgin-english, is the post about the skills of the people. Some do have blogger inspirations, some like to invest, but people enthusiastic, engaged in both terrains, should be rare. [Read here](https://steemit.com/steemit/@deathcross/can-this-be-the-real-reason-of-user-retention-on-steemit)

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