Much discussion has arisen on steemit about the topic of upvote buying via bots.
Some like to swing the moral club and want to ban it totally for the sake of fairness.
Reminds me a bit of communism, if everybody is poor, being poor is not so bad, only that even in communism not everybody is poor, those party leaders and their entourage for example usually enjoy the good life.
I came to steemit by 
So cautious as I am I started with what one Bitcoin would buy me last July, 1820 Steem.
In the beginning I upvoted articles by ecotrain authors, commented a bit and wondered a lot about my bad investment. While Bitcoin went crazy, Steem in terms of Bitcoin was slowly but steadily declining, only due to the Bitcoin rise in US$ my investment did not lose too much in fiat terms, about one third at the low.
I realised that while I could give about 36 % of my investment per year to others by upvoting, my curation rewards would be about 20% of that, so probably about 7 % a year, so I would have a hard time beating the built in inflation rate of Steem, which is about 9 % annually.
And suddenly steemit did not look so sexy anymore from an investor´s point of view.
Of course there are other benefits to steemit than the financial aspects, but in this post I want to focus on the financials.
So I figured the only way to make my investment worthwhile would be an appreciation of the Steem price itself, so I did some voodoo and the rest is history.😎
With Steem rising, self-esteem rose accordingly and the future looked bright.
Then I saw that some investors had decided to not settle for peanuts anymore, but sell their upvotes in a bidding process via bots.
I understand that they are not happy with their curation rewards alone, because of the Steem inflation, so they came up with a good business idea, good for them at least.
In the beginning I was like
“Wow, I can double my money! I give 100 SBD and the bot gives me 200.
Write one post per day, make 100 SBD a day, I can live from steemit, hooray!“
But alas, again I had not taken the steemit reward mechanism into account.
The following data I got from steemworld.org created by the wonderful 
Check it out!
Without it you are flying blind.
For example I gave 30 SBD to a bot which gave me an upvote of 64.74 SBD, so all looking good.
For the sake of calculation let´s assume there are no other upvotes on this post.
About 21 % of my total rewards on a post are usually curation rewards, so I stand to make 51.14 SBD.
According to the 50%/50% mechanism I get half of that in SBD so 25.57 SBD.
The other half will be divided by the current Steem/USD rate, right now 4.15 so 6.16 Steem will be powered up and appear as Steempower in my account.
1 Steem right now buys about 1.18 SBD so that 6.16 Steem is 7.27 SBD, so plus the initial 25.57 SBD the total is 32.84 SBD.
Since I paid 30 SBD for that, vote buying suddenly does not look so sexy anymore, but at least I did not lose any money on that one.
While writing this I did another bid, gave 20 SBD to a bot, got an upvote of 34.67 SBD, so not looking good, according to my math above.
Now if anyone of the smart guys here finds a flaw in my math, preferably pointing out that the rewards are greater than expected, I would be happy to stand corrected, but according to my math I would now say that you need at least an upvote worth twice the amount you paid to break even, so everything above that makes you a little money, below you lose.
So much for living from steemit by making 100 SBD every day from vote buying. 😁
Now you can tweak the numbers a bit in your favour as a vote buyer.
First of all, as a courtesy to your followers who actually read your posts and upvote them, so the humans on steemit, you should wait at least a day after posting till you employ the services of an upvote bot, so they can upvote in front of the bot and then their curation rewards might be a bit higher, so you do them a favour by paying and using the bot.
Second, if you upvote your own post before the bot, you gain a bit higher curation rewards too, I guess.
Third, some pilotfish follow them big whales and also upvote posts which the big bots are upvoting, so you make some more cents this way too.
Fourth, the post gets better visibility and might attract a few more upvotes by other people who would not have seen it otherwise.
Those additional bread crumbs are hard to quantify, at least for a hightech-lowlife like myself, but they are there.
But the real deal maker or breaker is the initial bot upvote being above or below twice the price you paid for it.
Considering that them bots also get the lion share of the curation rewards, so the amount they would ONLY get, if there was no vote buying, they really came up with a sweet deal for themselves and us little fish are probably quite stupid to play their game.
The little guys take all the risk of bidding too much and not getting enough back, so losing money and the big bots get their curation rewards anyway plus the money for their upvotes, sounds about as fair as the real world.
But since everybody is responsible for their own due diligence I have no sympathy for those sucker fish, only self-pity for myself. 😘
Another upvote bot problem is of course quality control regarding the posts they upvote. They have guidelines about the quality of posts they upvote on and they blacklist people who don´t comply with those rules, but the grey area is still there.
Be the sand you want to see in the cogs!
That´s why:
I have a dream!
I imagine a friendly whale, ploughing through the steemit sea, finding posts he likes and/or people are alerting him to their posts, for which he has very high standards, and then he offers an upvote to somebody for a post. If the author agrees, they have a contract now in which the author agrees to pay back a certain part of that upvote to the whale.
Then the whale upvotes and the author pays back the agreed amount after he has received the payout from the post.
This way the author has no bidding risk, the whale gets his curation rewards like always, supports only authors and posts he genuinely likes => quality control, and on top the whale gets some money back from the author. There is also no need for the whale to deal with the bot business, bot creation, bot maintenance etc, and if he chooses so, he would need to find only one good post per voting cycle and put all his might on that one.
Of course 24/7 automation, once running properly, has its advantages too and, as I pointed out already, those advantages are heavily on the side of the whale right now.
So my proposal is more suitable for a whale who likes real human interaction, reading and manual curation instead of an automated money machine, let´s just hope this kind of whale still does exist on steemit.
The author would be stupid to not pay the whale, because if he proves reliable and keeps providing quality content, he will surely get more upvotes from that whale, they have established a mutual beneficial business relationship, a smart contract 😎
An agreement fair to both could be something like:
Deduct 25% of the whale upvote to account for curation rewards (which more or less go back to the whale anyway) divide the rest by two to account for the 50%/50% mechanism, then the author could pay back all or a part of the liquid SBD part and gets to keep the SP part anyway, so the SP part is his profit and he doesn´t lose because of the curation part not being taken into account.
There could be of course some finetuning regarding that curation part, one could wait and see what percentage was taken away from the total rewards as curation and account for that, I´m sure some wizzard could come up with some tool pinpointing it to the cent, but I´m more the guy for the grand visions not for the petty details, that´s probably the reason why I thought vote buying would finance my life from now on. 😆
Now, according to the ever changing relationship between Steem and SBD other arrangements could be agreed upon, down to the need to power down a bit in order to give some of the SP back to the whale as Steem, in case Steem becomes very valuable and SBD not so much, but that´s the beauty of interhuman relationships, those conditions could always be renegotiated to reach a mutual beneficial agreement.
As I said before, I would love if somebody could point out some errors in my math regarding those upvote bots, which if corrected would show that buying votes is also good for the buyer not only for the bot, but as I see it now, it´s a bit of a gamble for the bidder.
Maybe the whole thing is a bit like poker, expected value and stuff, so the little fish are at each others throat fighting for bread crumbs, of a bread they already paid in the first place, which in my not so humble opinion is not exactly the smart thing to do.
Or maybe it´s like the lottery where people altogether pay more money than what will be won by one person in the end, so it´s a kind of tax for stupid people.
But people like to dream and in case I killed your dream of steemit riches by buying upvotes I´m sorry.
Please, somebody prove that my math is wrong!
And by the way, if a friendly whale comes across this post,
contact me in the comment section,
give me an upvote and we proceed as described above! 😍