What a great guy. Sean-king upvoted my post above. Note I had added to the end of that comment post. I think I made a very important point there about voting not being free of mental computational cost.
Edit: I added even more to the end of that comment post:
The curator rewards are such a small fraction of the voters Steem Power, that only those with significant Steem Power are economically motivated by curator rewards. Thus we could posit that minnow voters have no great mental calculation cost when voting since they can vote their conscience without significant curator reward implications. Although the minnows dont individually have much impact on the payout rewards, collectively they do since there are many more of them than there are whales. Thus we can conclude the white paper is more or less correct w.r.t. to minnows and w.r.t. to whales, the votes are not a replacement for micropayments because the whales vote doesnt involve an insignificant economics value.