"In short, bid bots and vote-selling markets are another reason for people outside the platform to invest, buy steem with fiat because they offer an opportunity for passive income in exchange for "currency risk".
So glad many Steemians are beginning to realize that the ethical bid-bots are one of the greatest things to ever happen on Steemit. Not only do they provide a way to lock up Steem in the form of SP, which reduces circulating supply, but they also give an annual ROI that is almost unmatched anywhere else in the crypto ecosystem.
The only minor issue is the bid-bots that don't screen for horrible spam content.
Not screening spam content isn't a big problem, it's just a matter of time before buying a vote cost most than the reward it can earn you.
The problem with bidbots is those who don't have any max cost protection.
If for example the weekly cost average is 2% for a vote and two people send a bid for 90% of capacity at almost the same time it will incur a 60% lost for both while it was clearly not what anybody sane had in mind.
The cost of the vote is variable and usually dependent on demand at that particular time, no?
The big bid-bots have protection from max downside loss. Smartsteem and The Rising for instance have 10% max loss on each voting round.
Are you taking inflation into consideration when you compare ROI from Steem bots with ROI for other cryptos. Last year, we had about a 25% increase in supply of Steem. If the bot ROI for last year was less than 25%, then that is a very poor return.
The reduced supply of SBD should give us closer to the 8.5% for 2019. Maybe the ROI will look a little better. Selling votes through bots is not great a return. If you want a great return, invest in something that brings money from outside the Steem ecosystem. Delegating to a DApp and obtaining a share of ad revenue could be an example of a better return.