What part are you confused about @xmaas? If it is the actual monetary and rewards aspect, I recently summarised this for another user here. If you already understand SBD, SP and STEEM, there is not much more value for you in there.
What this debate is about, is users upvoting posts that are about to approach the 7 day point, where the author is rewarded. Authors are buying massive upvotes on these old posts, which has a positive ROI. They do this on old posts because:
- The post is dead and forgotten, so they hope to not get spotted
- The payout deadline is near, so there is less time for a whale to counter the bot vote with a flag
The effect the purchased upvotes have is increased payout for the author buying the vote. This in turn reduces the Steem rewards pool, thus taking a small amount of money away from all other users on the platform.
That cleared things up for me quite a bit. Thank you for this explanation. It really did help. It's not something I would do myself because it just doesn't seem right. If people want to see what I'm posting that's great, but if not that's ok too. The money is just a great bonus for me, I mean I need it, but there's not enough in my account yet to bother withdrawing. I mostly blog for my own amusement, sharing stories of my past and present. Some people enjoy them, others mostly ignore them. No big deal. I just enjoy the camaraderie on here. I would like to be able to have a couple thousand dollars to help my wife out with bills at some point. I won't stoop to buying votes though.
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