Voting Bots and Vote Values – What Vote Returns Worth?

Plus 10 SBD (~ $80 USD) Prize Contest
Knowlege is Strength

Some Thoughts First

It could be just a Contest Post for the Voting Bots and the Vote Values. But i also find it as a good chance to write down some of my thoughts. If you are not interested to read them, you can ignore this section and jump directly to the contest section below.

From my first days in steemit, I realized that if you are not a “whale” or if you have not other “whales” (users with big steem power) to vote your post, the chance to see it getting more than 1-2 bucks is ZERO. The post value will not increase more than 1 - 2 bucks even if 100+ minnows upvote it. It may happen sometimes to get a “whale” vote that will boost the post value, but this is not the rule.

Making Contest Posts and sharing the 50% of the Author Rewards to the winners, the only way to have my posts to get some value and get some returns to share to the winners, was to use the voting bots. I am doing this for months, paying the voting bots for upvotes, that in the most cases never return even the money I pay for. I usually have to put “fresh” money from my pocket and the earnings from the comment rewards, to run the next contest.

Although that there is much conversation (and flagging) lately in steemit, about those who are paying for upvotes and for the "huge returns" they have, the ugly truth is totally different. In my case, assuming that I pay 50% of the Author Rewards to the winners, for every SBD I spend for upvotes I lose 30% to 70% or more, regarding the average Vote Values that returned by the voting bots. In fact, I fund with my own money or the comment rewards I earn, every contest I make. Basic mathematics is enough to prove this.

The only benefit I see by the use of the voting bots (with the current returns), is that they increase the post value helping it to rank better in the “HOT” or in the “TRENDING POSTS” sections, increasing the chances to be seen by more people. Additionally for the bots that having curation trails, you get a bunch of upvotes that do not worth much, but increase the total number of the votes in your post, making it to show more popular.

I was always thinking that the voting bots is a very good and profitable business for those who run them. I have change a little this approach seen the big SP delegations that take place in steemit lately. Most of those that running voting services are rather simple WORKERS trying to make some bucks leasing SP from 5 - 10 big steemit whales and paying them a lot of STEEM or SBD daily for that lease.

It’s obvious that the whole system have designed to work for those who already have big STEEM POWER. Doing some maths, you will easily see that as the STEEM PRICE GROWS, the rewards in given STEEM POWER (SP) for those who work hard to keep this platform alive, REDUCED … Minnows & Dolphins must pray for the STEEM price to drop to get more steem power (SP). I will not judge this at the moment. Steemit is a Business.

I will close my thoughts with this:
With the STEEM price in $6 USD if you invest 1 SBD to a voting bot to get 3 SBD return as author rewards and 0.5 STEEM POWER (SP), the vote must be 8X. (8 SBD as we use to say, even if it's not correct). As the STEEM price goes higher the returned SP reduced.

Below is an example of my latest contest showing what i have spend to the bots and what returns i expect.

As you can easily see in the above table, I have spend 5.08 SBD to the voting bots and I expect to receive back 6.315 SBD and 1.010 SP.
50% of the 6,315 SBD will be shared to the winners that is 3.157 SBD.
What remains to me is a joke: 6,315 SBD (returns) - 5,08 SBD (cost) - 3,157 SBD (winners share) = -1,92 SBD. (negative)
The voting bots returns are so little that can not help in my case and I am losing 1,92 SBD.
What i really benefit from this process is the 1,01 Steem Power (SP).
@aksdwi and @upgoater votes give negative return in SBD. And if you are not very selective at the time of bidding this can happen with the most of the other bots and voting services.
I am wondering why the people that running the bots, do not add a few lines of code to prevent bids in cases that they can not give votes with REAL profit 30%-50%-100% to the bidders. They know the algorithm, they can do it, why they do not? are they so greedy and want to become rich overnight against all the other steemit users? For me, this is very close to SCAM, based in the ignorance of the bidders.

THE CONTEST: Minimum Vote Return

The contest is based in an existing steemit post that analyzes in detail how the steemit rewards algorithm works. (the link will be posted in the winners announcement post).

THE PRIZE

10 SBD (~ $80 USD) will be shared equally to the winners plus any additional Donations if exist.

Contest Assumptions

Assume that the STEEM price is $6 USD

The Contest Questions

If you spend 1 SBD to a voting bot to upvote your post, what must be the minimum vote value to get back your 1 SBD ?
What SP (steem power) will you get from that vote?
(in our case, this is really what your profit will be from the vote)

Some Help

25% of the post value goes to the curators (assume that nothing returns to you from it)
75% of the post value returns to you
The 75% split 50-50 to SBD and STEEM POWER (SP)
The given SP depends on the STEEM Price (internal Steemit price for STEEM)

Contest Entries Format

Post your entries to the contest in the comments section of this post, in the following format:

EXAMPLE ENTRY

Min vote value to get your money back: 2.95 (2 decimals)
Received Steem Power (SP) : 0,183 (3 decimals)

( 2 decimal for the vote value, 3 decimal for the SP)

WINNER

The Winner or the Winners will be those that will answer correct to both questions.

DEADLINE

You can post your entries to the contest until Thursday, January 11, 2018 – 18:00 GMT

* Find all my running contests here.

Thank you

@digitalking