There are many solutions:
- force the whales to power down if they have greater than 1% of the Steem pool (not counting that held by the #1 Steem account)
- cap the amount that a single up-vote can add (and a single flag subtract)
- allow everyone the option to register partial up-votes and multiple up-votes based on size (minnows need to be able to clump up-votes, whales often need/want to divide them -- particularly flagging when flagging first time offenders and newbies).
2 is something I thought might work but it takes away something called "casino effect" which is very important to steemit. So we can't have that. [ read @dana-edwards for more, very good info ]