Many people are frustrated by the situation with vote bots on Steem - I have written on this a few times, including this post on the issue of whether we should be supporting proof of wallet or proof of brain. Today I had an idea that might do something to improve the situation until more complete solutions are available (such as might become possible once communities and SMTs go live here)...
The idea of bid bots is that people put some Steem Power into an account and then sell the votes for money to whoever wants to put in a bid for the vote. This short circuits the 'proof of brain' concept that Steem was founded on, since now anyone can gain votes regardless of how much work or brain was involved in their post - they only need to prove they have money and not a brain. There are numerous problems with this, including that it demotivates new users who might want to get rewarded for their brains and it also puts off casual surfers from viewing and reading the site since they assume that if the most rewarded posts are of a low quality, then the rest of the site must be too.
There is an additional problem here, in that selling votes is actually akin to the bot owner constantly self voting themselves! This is not often spoken about, but if you think about it - you could use your Steem Power to just constantly upvote yourself and no-one else - which would be frowned on by the community.. Or you could sell your votes, get paid and then even use that money to buy votes from other bots (if you wanted to) and this would basically be the same as constantly self upvoting yourself, except that you might be seen as providing a 'community service' instead of just being greedy! Even if the bot owners don't invest in buying votes from others, the payment they receive can be used to continually buy more Steem Power and to exponentially increase their wealth and power in the community.
The knock on effect of this is that those people who run the bots will often tend to get large reputations and build up their personal power too.. Is there a better way?
What about @steemit?
The @steemit account is owned/operated by Steemit inc. and currently holds over $125 Million USD worth of Steem and SBDs! That money is not being delegated to anyone and apparently isn't being used for anything. I think it does actually get used for some kind of function within the workings of Steem (IIRC), but I might be wrong on that.
What if Steemit Inc. ran a vote buying service, using the Steem Power from that account?
They would be able to set it up to undercut other vote bot operators and this would cut out these people's ability to inflate their own reputation and wealth.
Steemit inc. could then use the profits to fund useful projects, such as the crowdfunding projects on https://fundition.io, for example.
Balance?
Isn't this MUCH more balanced and fair than the current situation?
Maybe I have missed something, but I am open to all comments.. What do you think/feel?
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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