RE: Where is the Trust in Proof of Brain mining?
I had never really thought of the upvote bot's in this way, but I think you explain this very well and I can see that you are right - the created steem is counterfeit because the bot has no idea if the content is worth the upvote value it is giving.
I do use upvote bot's to reward posts where my own upvote is not sufficient to give the reward I feel the post deserves - in this case is the generated Steem counterfeit because I used my own judgement to send the upvote bot to that post.
Unfortunately I don't see the bot's going away anytime soon, and in reality what they fill in for is the lack of real people working through posts, manually curating, encouraging authors with relevant engaging comments. There is incredible content being produced on here, easily good enough to impress and attract investors - if the were lucky enough to see it. And they won't if they look at Trending.
Your example about employing a voting bot to put more power in one's Proof of Brain is an interesting angle. Without voting bots perhaps the Promote option would service the situation you have highlighted?
P.S.
My feeling is that a decentralized annonymous Proof of Brain CAPCHA needs designing.
Buying votes from bots is exactly the same as self voting only that way whales get a chunk too so that's fine by them
Agreed.