They are not wasting all of their SBD's to buy more votes, they trade them for more steem to add more Steem power so they have a bigger vote
That is called smarter than you
Is it smarter though?
if you have 10SBD - you can put it into a bot, get roughly $10 worth of SBD back as well as $10 worth of SP.
if you put that 10SBD straight into SP you'll get around 12SP...
so how much does that extra 2SP increase your vote power? by 0.01 cents?
how long will it take to make up that difference in the fact that you could have had 10SBD sitting there for a 0.01 cent lower vote value?
I'm not arguing against your "greater good" argument, because that is correct, but this point that I've highlighted was incorrect.
For the few users who send the larger SBD bids but that causes every other user trying to bump their post 1 or 2 dollars to get negative results. Singular reward over group benefit.
Let BTC get back to 25k plus and if steem stays low I will build Grumpy 2, 3 and 4 and just set flags to follow the upvote bots.
You know there's bots that aren't bid bots right?
I have yet to find a bot other than that stupid cat reply bot that was not making some form of money off of minnows. What do you have? I would like to check some out.
well the concept of bid bots, that I'm referring to, are those ones that give out a 100% vote every 2.4 hours to whoever has placed a bid. often the bids exceed the value of the vote, so those bidding end up at a loss. Reason being, if you place your bid early on in the process, you don't know how many people are going to bid after you and therefore cause you to have a loss. (could even be somebody related to the bot owner for all we know).
When I say there are bots that aren't bid bots, they're bots that still sell upvotes, but do so in a way that is sustainable - mostly be either using their own SP or by using the voting permissions of anybody that wishes to sell their upvotes. At least in those circumstances whilst the bot might be making money from minnows, the minnows are also making money from the bots.
@erodedthoughts and @farq forgive me for butting in here ... I'm reading these posts and comments with great interest and am happy to have found people who are genuine ... just need an answer please (I hope I don't get my head bitten off here!) ... what is the opinion of SBI steembasicincome?
Well I've been in it for a month or so.
I'm not sure if the parameters have changed
But I paid 1SBD for myself and another to have a share each.
Each vote I get is worth around 0.01.
So it'll take a while to break even. Maybe 100 votes or so. Or 50 if I only consider my share.
In my case though, I made a post to find that second person that I would include, and from memory I made around half of that 1sbd back, so I probably need around 40-50 posts before i reach break even point, which hopefully won't take too much longer.