RE: Bid Bots Demystified and Reasons Why You Probably Shouldn’t Be Using Them
There is one more thing that you have not mentioned and that most Steemians tend to forget when using bid- or fixed-value-bots.
The Steem bot tracker does not (can not!) calculate the changing reward pool that depends mainly on the price of Steem in US-Dollars. So when you pay for a 1$ upvote for a new post, 7 days later, when the post is paid out, this vote might be worth 2$ or just 0.50$! Normally the swings in the reward pool are not more than 10% in a week, but in the last 10 days the Steem price did a hell of a rollercoaster ride.
The tricky part is, that the rewards pool calculates with the average price of the past few days, so the rewards kept going up until Saturday, even though the peak of the Steem price was reached last Wednesday!
Last Tuesday I saw that the price of Steem had more than doubled, but the rewards pool hadn't changed much, so I was able to get 37.23$ upvotes in return for an investment of just 7.193$ that I split between different bots (bid-bots as well as fixed-value bots). Check out my post and my wallet if you don't believe me! It confirmed my theory about the rewards pool and how to actually use bid-bots profitable!
So if you had paid 1$ for a 1,50$ upvote 10 days ago for a post that was paid out last Saturday, what seems like a really bad ROI would have be a great ROI because the 1,50$ vote would have been worth about 4$ last Saturday at payout!
Since the Steem price fell during the past few days, it currently works the other way round, so if the Steem price is not going up again, paying 1$ for a 2,50$ upvote today will probably lead to a negative ROI at the date of payout, no matter if you use a bid-bot or a fixed-value bot!
Well, of course, that can happen because of the 7-day waiting period. But it could swing the other way as well. Imagine buying votes in SBD and STEEM went down during your pay period. You can now get more STEEM with you SBD payout. Also, your visibility can be higher if you have more votes on your posts which in itself can get more votes.
Well, what I tried to say is that it is not just gambling!
Last week on Wednesday one could have paid upvote bots to upvote a post due for payout last Friday (2 days later!), knowing that the rewards pool on Friday would be higher than the rewards pool on Wednesday, since on Tuesday the price of Steem had already gone up by more than 100%, but the rewards pool had not gone up not yet!
And I am not saying that bots are bad, they can be great if you know what you are doing (but most people don't..)!
Well I know now...haha thanks you guys! <3
This is an interesting thought, but isn't it akin to trying to time the market? You're then just using upvotes as a way of "trading" crypto. You don't really know where the market is going to go between the upvote and the payout.
No, you didn't get what I mean. The rewards pool takes the average price of the past few days, so there is a delay. So when the market went up a lot today and yesterday but goes down tomorrow, the rewards pool will still go up tomorrow!
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying :)
That’s a good point as well, changes my view regarding the profitability of bid bots! Using bid bots is a big gamble, I use them as advertising for my really good posts. So I’m going to have to think about that. I want more views the hot page offers but I will have to weigh the costs.