Speaking of equality, I note that witness elections feature Steem tokens that are more equal than others, and always have.

User A has 1M Steem and votes 30 witnesses, influencing governance with 30M Steem (1M x 30 votes). User B has 100 Steem and votes 30 witnesses, influencing governance with 3000 Steem (100 Steem x 30 votes). The difference between their stakes is 999,900 Steem. The difference between their influence on witness elections, and thus governance, is however 29,997,000 Steem.

The more Steem you have, the more each Steem token you have influences governance, and this was coded into Steem by Stinc, who once had ~80% of the Steem in existence, and that Sun now owns. This is why his stake, which is between 1/5 and 1/3 of the stake extant, is able to completely control governance by electing a consensus of witnesses.

We aren't in danger of resembling Orwell's Animal Farm. We've long been on it. This is more like the oligarchy is being replaced by a solitary overlord. The community is just an asset.

Our Steem in it's dribs and drabs, doesn't impact governance much. I reckon the legacy Steem whales are doing all they can already to prevent their power from being eliminated and Sun having that power instead.

The devil we know vs. the devil we don't. Not sure which is which TBQH.

Edit: it's notable that ordinary votes have always featured VP, which depletes when votes are cast and recharges over time. This has been tested for four years via normal Steem operations, and is well characterized and understood.

Removing the multiplication of stake weight witness elections feature is a simple matter of applying VP to SP used to vote for witnesses, setting the depletion parameter to 100%, and setting recharge to 0%. Then each Steem used to vote on a witness would only apply once. The difference in stake held by User A and User B is 999,900 Steem, and the difference in the weight of their influence on governance would be 999,900 Steem, as DPoS requires for decentralization.

When witnesses and stakeholders address the proposal to implement 1 Steem = 1 vote, I have been struck by the immediate resort to FUD and claims it would require study, questions as to whether other DPoS chains have tried it, and claims the voting system as it is is fair and needs no improvements - even as Sun takes over the chain.

This reveals the degree to which legacy witnesses have been empowered by this extraordinary weighting of substantial stakes to control governance, and how much their power depends on it. The most striking thing about this to me is that these witnesses are so unwilling to address this inequity, they'd rather see Sun takeover the chain than change to 1 Steem = 1 vote.

What I expect to evolve from this situation is that Sun finds those among the current witnesses he can work with, and they become Sun's toadies serving our new overlord.