I guess on the flipside of the equation witnesses would be very keen on not scaring away larger investors or preventing massive sell-offs of steem because of the costs to run servers. There is ample enough steem on the open market for anyone to go buy enough to be a whale and it's quite clear by this point that more people sell than buy in during these price spikes, or else they'd be ramps to new baselines instead of quick multi-month pump and dumps.