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RE: Revisiting BidBots : A Necessary Evil?
When I use bidbots it's generally to try get a bit more attention to a post, which rarely works, or to reward my upvoters with more curation rewards. Lately I can't really be bothered with them.
I do delegate to a few bidbots for some regular returns - though I guess I should review the actual level of returns and redelgate everything. I particularly like bidbots where you can buy the vote for someone else's psot. However, @steem-bounty and @steembasicincome fillful much of that role for me now.
Thanks for the mentions. I used to write extensively about bid-bots (right about the time I started @steembasicincome, so buried pretty deep in my feed now.
Bid-bots are driven by demand/supply equilibrium just like everything else in a free market. In this case, most of the conversation is dominated by demand (do you use bid-bots, and why?) with little attention given to supply. Remember that bid-bots arose during a period when SBD premiums meant that instead of the 'official' 25/75 split, the actual split between curation/author was more like 5/95. If you had a significant amount of stake, you were eager to monetize that and capturing the author side of the equation (by inducing authors to pay most of their rewards for a quick 105% ROI).
At that time, Supply far outstripped demand, and it was common for me to submit bids to bots that were less than 50% bid, in the last ten minutes. Then Steem Bot Tracker came (great service) and tracking and using multiple bots became orders of magnitude easier and demand skyrocketed.
Resolution of the bid-bot 'problem' will never be achieved through a focus on demand. Cut demand and if supply is still strong then higher profits will be made by the 'demand' that still exists- amplifying the profits (and eventual influence) of the people that ignore the moral suasion campaign against bots and keep using them.
Bid-bots will only go away when their are viable long-term alternatives at scale. Have you ever wondered why @steembasicincome only takes in 0.50 SP per new enrollment, but backs that enrollment with 2 SP of voting power? It puts us on a constant treadmill of needing to lease more SP and then cover its costs from our earning on that SP before each lease is due for renewal (explained elegantly by @ecoinstant) in our recent 'Sustainability' series.
And that's intentional. 'Curation' in @steembasicincome is crowdsourced- votes allocated based on how much support members have given to and received from their communities (you're literally the best example of this). But on the flip side... Steem Basic Income is now leasing over 300k SP of ongoing delegation through dlease's markets at rates that are comparable to self-voting APR (if not better). So while the SBI focus and marketing is all about the demand side of the promotion equation, the back-end design is all about the supply side: let's create an alternative passive income stream for high SP stakeholders that is less detrimental to Trending pages (because the demand is committed to a long-term focus by a 3-year earnback term instead of 3-5 days).
And this ended up about as long as I expected, which means that after some feedback from you and minor revision I will cross-post in a few days either to my page or to an SBI update.
Hi, may I add a few things. The so-called bidbots emerged when vote-buying was largely done manually; once it became automated it hit the obvious problem of the voting account running out of VP. So bidbots are one way to distribute a limited resource, the voting-account's upvote value, among more than one vote-buyer.
Why this even works is due to the mathematics embedded within the Steem blockchain. If user A transfers some STEEM to user B and then B upvotes A, then it is possible that both A and B profit from the dual transaction. Any two people can do the calculations and profit from this.
It is not "cheating the system" because it is encoded in the system and, from what I can see, nobody has the stomach to change the algorithm. One may have moral qualms, but the blockchain has no moral functions or commands. I'm not even being flippant here, the Steem blockchain has a built-in economic model that allows content-less profits. Steemit the website just uses the Steem model as is. What a website like SteemHunt has done, and to some extent SteemSTEM, is to add the social aspects of their social websites by having human curators and their own tokens with a different model to the underlying Steem blockchain. I am surprised we have not seen more take this route - perhaps we will with tools like SCOT and some well designed new tokens.
Like you, this got long :-)
As an afterthought, maybe SBI can go down that route :-)
When I read the SMT whitepaper (which SCOT also is using as their design specifications document - although as a layer 2 sidechain instead of at protocol level, obviously) a year ago, I had a lot of thoughts about how SBI could transition into an SMT and help build a different economic model. The pieces aren't all in place yet and we will have to evaluate and make the right decisions once they are, but that possibility is still there.
When I read that SMT paper the things I didn't like were the limited choices of upvote-curve and curation-curve. My understanding of SCOT is that those limitations are no longer there. On the one hand, one needs to keep the current Steem model but it also means that one's token could have a completely different model. Needs some serious dev tho!
One of the advantages to building as a layer 2 protocol, is that it becomes less restricted by previous design decisions. On the other hand, SCOT does not offer a consensus framework, so it's currently not decentralized. Once SMT's reach full release, I will do a deep-delve side-by-side and decide which (if either) is the best path forward for SBI tokenization.
That all makes sense now. I've often joked that I want to give away so much SBI that it because economically stupid for me to not post more often. I had been looking at SBI more as a way of encouraging reciprocal given to cement communities and a way to encourage good content creators to stick around because they know they get some guaranteed value for posting. It does make sense for SBI to help deal with the supply side of bidbots. A difference with bidbots is I can finance those with stake and withdraw that stake. SBI, well, they're kinda locked in. I guess they can be cashed in but I the process isn't as seamless. Still, when the window is long-term, locking up stake or SBI doesn't make much difference.
Enrollments are locked in, but there are two different ways to delegate. With delegation, it's not locked in but can be withdrawn at any time.
Delegation does not directly benefit specific people the way an enrollment does, of course.
So when I talk about targeting supply, it's the delegation options- because you're right, normal enrollments and sponsoring (the way we market and the way most think of SBI) is never going to be perceived as a good alternative to delegating to a bid bot.