There was a reason why I had the $15 example . . . . :-) The problem could be mitigated somewhat if there was an account minimum for curation awards BUT . . . . honestly, it's pretty clear to me that, if Steem hits it big, there is going to have to be some sort of account validation for curation to prevent bot abuse. My minimalist bot easily makes over a 10% yearly return on investment and I could probably double that if I start throwing some of my AI expertise at it. The square root proposal plus account validation will dramatically reduce the incentive for a company to try to use a whale bot to harvest money from Steem.