The current incentives push everyone to vote for themselves. If everyone ends up voting for themselves, SP lose its use and the demand will be none and everyone will have lost but those who have invested, or mined and keep their Steem, they will have lost much more than those who have next to nothing.
Why would anyone should try to make one good post a day and exchange their 9 other votes for 9 other votes of the same weight rather than simply upvoting themselves 10 times on random comments?
Investors are looking for the best place to invest their money which pushes them to upvote themselves exclusively. This will ultimately renders SP useless.
This assumes that the only reason people want steem power is to make a return on investment. This thinking will cause the problems that you are predicting. But if steem power is marketed as a way for you to reward people you like and influence the platform, it will never degenerate to the point where everyone just votes for themselves.
Personally, I vote for posts that I like, to reward the authors. Not because I'm trying to make the best return on investment, it is people with this mindset that we need to attract to steem, not people just in it for the money. That would turn this into a game theory nightmare! Sure I vote on my own posts but I don't post as often as I would like so 95% of my votes go to others.
Hopefully this makes sense, I greatly appreciate and value your opinion on this and many other topics.
Bid-bots are controlling an increasing amount of voting power for the reasons I just stated. An increasing amount of voting power is use to upvote themselves for the same obvious basic game theory reason.
How would you feel if you invested 200,000$ and were seeing the guy next to you invest the same thing but only vote themselves or delegate to a bid-bots making many times more than you are?
Depends on why I invested. I'm not primarily invested in steem for the money so I don't compare myself monetarily to others on the platform.
I see your point though and I think that is probably steem's biggest weakness is that everyone is focusing exclusively on the money. I think a better platform will be one where the people using it are less worried about roi and more worried about enjoying the content.
If everyone is just trying to make money then steem becomes more like a ponzi scheme, the initial investors only get money if more people invest. There needs to be an equilibrium, everyone can't expect monetary returns