Re. buying upvotes, it doesn't matter if you buy them at a specific price. Steem can work only if people vote on other people's content because they think it's good and therefore likely to reward them indirectly if the content becomes popular. If you introduce a direct money reward for voting, people start having a vested interest saving their votes to upvote posts that give them some cash back at the expense of regular content. This creates a shortcut from voting to reward that doesn't involve finding and upvoting good content and threatens to undermine the curation mechanism. It also divests some of the daily content reward away from authors of valuable content to authors of paid-vote schemes that bring no added value to the community. The bottom line is that allowing paid votes risks undermining the whole system by reducing the incentive to produce good content and curate other people's content and therefore affect the overall quantity and quality of content on the network.

Stake holders who are familiar with the way things are working on Steem and economically rational know that allowing votes buying is a self-defeating proposition. Accordingly you can expect that there will always be consensus among stake holders to prevent vote buying and other forms of direct an indirect bribery. This is the reason why your post was downvoted very prompty after it drew the attention of larger stake holders.