I do recall you supporting the EIP after I got Inc's support, which obviously means very little. I didn't know you were a proponent for economic change beforehand.

It was only a suspicion that you were not, and if that's incorrect, it's a factual error on my part.

If that's an apology, then I accept it. Again, I was always in favour of the EiP.

My self voting was a reaction to a broken economic system that punished honest voting that began end of 2017, when I had began advocating for economic change, and the voting didn't enter full swing until may last year. The people who lost out the most were investors who voted honestly.

I know and that's what I was telling people when they complained about your behaviour. Which is why it's so ironic that you painted me as your enemy, while in reality I was understanding where you were coming from and what your goal was: shine a light on the broken economy without accepting to lose money while being invested in Steempower.

As you can tell from my tone, the last thing I fucking wanted was a broken economy for 2 years, but I sure as hell wasn't going to be a martyr and just surrender my part of the voting rewards when vote selling and self voting were rampant.

Again, I understood that, see above.

Are you saying why didn't I just sell my vote instead of self vote? How dare I not offer my cut to the bid bot owners?

No. What I was referring to was the fact that you acted as if your self-voting on puppets was fine, since it was in the past, while pointing the finger at me and making me the martyr.

Things are obviously very different now, but under the old economy blacklisting bots doesn't work. It either doesn't really raise standards and is just a bit of empty virtue signalling, or it actually raises standards and gets out-competed by other bots.

Correct. I tried to go the whitelist-only route with Smartsteem at the very beginning but had to open-up the gates, or I would have never gotten anywhere. And yes, blacklisting simply resulted in spammers heading to other bots, overbidding and making it difficult to compete. However, I still did that. With EiP though, I'm able to go back to whitelisting.

I'd like you to address the economics of bid botting in more detail please. Maybe I'm too harsh on you and you're genuinely not seeing the disastrous economic impact bid bots have on here, and maybe you genuinely don't see the equivalence between self voting and vote selling. But I sincerely thought that you understood all of this and were just fucking with me the entire time.

I do see the impact, but I don't think manual curation will fix everything. There is a place for manual curation and there is a place for promotion. If you disallow people from using promotion services, then give them an alternative. You can't just take away cola from a person, without giving them water.

Also, how do you see a co existence of a vote selling economy vs an honest voting economy without one subsuming the other? I honestly don't see one.

With "honest voting economy" you mean that whales decide what gets seen and what doesn't? I don't think that model is absolutely wrong, but I don't think it's completely correct either. Stake-based voting is a great tool for securing the chain (witness voting) and distributing rewards (proposal voting and rewards pool voting).

But deciding on what gets seen?

I do think stake-based voting is unfit for that, in its current form. Is it really proof-of-brain, if just one rich person could decide what gets in front of peoples eyeballs and what doesn't?

Having everyone do it on their own via promotion services isn't the right solution as well, but this doesn't mean the blame is purely on people using promotion services. Why is it that manual curation is the only form of proof-of-brain you can accept? Deciding which content should be allowed to promote, is also some form of curating. And then for people to downvote content they deem not worthy for eyeballs, is also part of proof-of-brain.

And actually, downvoting everything i.e. the clean trending initiative, is something not using proof-of-brain, because you're downvoting, regardless if it's good or bad. It simply has bought votes on it.