The steemit whitepaper is an absurd document that is full of hypocrisy. They write about consensus and voting which would imply that its democratic but the way they weight their voting system its a an outright third world dictatorship. A whale can crush a regular user at anytime and somehow that is ok.
"Steem is designed around a relatively simple concept: everyone’s meaningful contribution to the
community should be recognized for the value it adds" - This is a joke because whales get and give each other large tokens for trivial upvotes and one line comments and posts.. its a farce.