A Warning ahead: Lot's of irony and hypocrisy coming..

The first pillar of @berniesanders Steemit Empire is his upvote bot business, which is been taken care of right now.

The second pillar are his activities as witness of the Steem blockchain.

For now, we can do little about it, but he is currently not in the top 20, which means, his payouts based on creating blocks is rather limited. When the time has come and it turns out to be necessary, there will be some action too in that direction. After all, so far he missed more than 1,000 blocks (in letters: more than one thousand). A rather lousy record, I have to say. But for now, he's good on position 51.

The third pillar is sort of an outrageous one, at least if you judge that by his own standards.

Bernie doesn't like it when Steemit whales are engaging in self-upvoting. There is an extended record with him fighting against @haejin and also @sweetsssj has been affected by his rage righteousness. Believe this outrageous accusation or not, but our precious snowflake @berniesanders is regularly engaged in self-upvoting to fill up and extend his flagging capabilities. That needs to stop too, or at least curbed to a sensible level.

But before we can do something about it, we need to know some more details about that.

On Steemworld, I looked at all imcoming votes for @berniesanders, his most active account (both articles and comments). Here they are:

Account	Upvote Worth In $ (Within 7 Days)	Type Of Upvote
postpromoter	92.84	UPVOTE BOT
appreciator	85.54	UPVOTE BOT
smartsteem	83.69	UPVOTE BOT
booster	68.15	UPVOTE BOT
thecyclist	53.91	SELF-UPVOTE
randowhale	52.81	SELF-UPVOTE
promobot	42.78	UPVOTE BOT
thedelegator	25.81	SELF-UPVOTE
ipromote	16.2	UPVOTE BOT
yougotflagged	15.93	SELF-UPVOTE
steemservices	10.22	SELF-UPVOTE
ngc	8.36	SELF-UPVOTE
thebotkiller	7.01	SELF-UPVOTE
geoffrey	5.97	user
danknugs	5.34	SELF-UPVOTE
noisy	4.87	user
steepshot	4.74	user
theyeti	3.7	SELF-UPVOTE
rivalhw	3.25	user
sephiroth	2.51	user
unchainedio	2.39	user
jonny-clearwater	2.35	user
dineroconopcion	2.25	user
abusereports	1.33	SELF-UPVOTE
riskdebonair	1.31	user
firepower	1.23	user
tuck-fheman	1.17	user
all upvotes < 1$	24.66	user

I would like to point out that I don't have any grudge towards users who upvoted one of his posts or comments. That can be fanboys, sure, but it is very well possible that the upvote were completely legitimate and based on the content.

Here is the summary of all upvotes by type of upvote:

Type Of Upvote	Upvote Worth In $ (7 Days)	Average Worth Of Upvotes Per Day In $
SELF-UPVOTE	184.42	26.34
UPVOTE BOT	389.2	55.6
user	56.7	8.1

Besides the fact that he apparently is at least on-par with @sweetsssj and her self-upvoting, these tables offer three important insights...

1. The popularity of his posts are rather limited, if you only look at pure upvotes by users:

8.1 $ is above average, but it is not unusual. This is perhaps the average of a user offering quality content on a regular base.

Without his witness activities and without his own upvote bot, he resembles less a whale, but more one of these little worms with flukes that swim in the Amazon river and crawl up your urethra.

Surprising is the absence of real popularity. This is another strong argument that he can be beaten.

2. Surprise, surprise, @berniesanders is heavily engaged in self-upvoting.

Something he is notoriously known for criticizing other whales and fighting them for it. I believe everyone knows Sein Kampf his struggle against @haejin and @sweetsssj and I am sure, others can tell a similar story.

This shows again that he is claiming the one thing while doing the exact opposite. A well known theme by Socialists. Or the variant in this case: He accuses others of doing exactly what he is doing himself. That is as boring as it is hazardous for every community.

3. Upvotes by bots are a very important source of income for him.

While it could be that other users like his content so much that they pay a bot for upvoting him, this deserves a bit of a closer look to see what's exactly behind these bot upvotes. After all, they are massive.

So, let's take a closer look at the big spenders for @berniesanders content. The upvotes went to an article he posted on Monday about Dmania, in which he criticizes the platform for enabling copyright infringement. But to that further below. Here is the list of upvote patrons via upvote bot:

Upvote Bot	Amount Spend	User Who Bought The Upvote
@postpromoter	50 SBD	@ngc
@smartsteem	50 SBD	@ngc
@appreciator	50 SBD	@ngc
@booster	40 SBD	@ngc
@promobot	25 SBD	@ngc
@ipromote	unknown	unknown

The stats to one of the purchases by @ngc

As you can see in this list, @ngc is one of the side accounts owned by @berniesanders / @nextgenctypto.

Therefore again: Surprise, surprise, he's upvoting his own stuff massively to promote his cruisade (or maybe jihad?) against everything not fitting in his world view. But more than anything else, I have this question for you @berniesanders:

Why are you using 3rd party upvote bots when you have YOUR OWN UPVOTE BOT?

• Are you maybe not trusting your own bot to get the upvoting done? (Should customers really trust your services, if you don't even trust them yourself?)
• Or are you maybe trying to HIDE YOUR TRACKS, so you can still pretend to have a clean slate which makes it easier to slander and fight others who disagree with you?

Dubious, very dubious, I have to say...

As we can see, @berniesanders went out and bought external upvotes for a whopping 215 SBD from five upvote bots. But the sixth one, that hasn't originated from him. Somebody else must have really liked his article and gave him the upvote. Question is: Who?

Answer: His best pal @themarkymark (the 3.5th pillar) made him a little present

The more I am digging myself through these upvote bots, the more I find @themarkymark as owner of bots. He really is a big fish in the Steemit pond. By far bigger than @berniesanders himself. And apparently, he owns this @ipromote bot as well (others are @upmyvote for which he got a delegation from @berniesanders and @buildawhale). Not bad...

An attitude in the tradition of Wjatscheslaw Michailowitsch Molotow.

And so it looks like he got his bestie @berniesanders a nice upvote for his attack on Dmania. I cannot be sure about it, because there is no record of the usual combination of money+URL in the memo going to the bot, but there is a 35 Steem transfer to @ipromote by @themarkymark on that day without memo. Since the bot doesn't have too many other activities going, this is a strong indicator for him being the patron of the sixth upvote. Also on the same day, there was another 734 SBD transfer by @themarkymark to @ipromote.

Looks like somebody is trying to expand his network of upvote bots. And I do have to admit: It's the hell of a business. But to be honest, I have also certain doubts that the upvote business of @themarkymark will survive this...

A little sidenote on @berniesanders harsh criticism of Dmania

To spare you the clicking, here is a screenshot of the entire post:

Getting >500$ for this almost haiku sized brain fart is very generous. But after all, he managed to connect @ned directly to plagiarism - playing the good old emotional fiddle. Not everyone is brazen enough to do so.

While I don't even have a problem with the core of the criticism itself - plagiarism is a systemic risk to Steemit - I am wondering why @berniesanders chose this way of showing his opposition to Dmanias "support" of plagiarism, but doesn't do anything on his end to prevent such blatant stealing from being rewarded in the first place. I am not (necessarily) talking here about flaggging users who post this kind of stolen imagery, but I am talking about his upvote bot @randowhale.

He has both the power and capabilities to exclude posts from getting a paid upvote that contain a Dmania URL. Or he even could exclude all posts that only contain only an image without any or barely text! More than a simple scan of the respective post would not be necessary.

@berniesanders could totally do that and pass it on to other upvote bot owners to make it a platform standard, but nothing on that front either...

When going through his upvote business, I realized that a good share of @randowhale customers are exactly doing what he criticizes in his post. They literally steal some image on Google, add a title, post it and then go shopping at bernie's.

• Why are you not preventing this effectively, @berniesanders?

• Could it be that you don't really want to do something about it, because this would harm your business?

• Is the classic public outcry maybe just a convenient excuse by pretending, you do something to improve the platform while EXACTLY KNOWING nothing will happen?

• And what about your friend, the upvote bot tycoon @themarkymark. Is at least he preventing plagiarists from getting paid upvotes and therefore getting attention?

It doesn't look to me like that. You can flag me, call me a scammer, a @haejin soldier or like just before nuke me with "potential Nazi sympathizer", but not even you can change this:

"The blockchain never lies." (Quote, @berniesanders)

That counts for you, too, young man. And the more I look at it, the more it becomes visible, how pathetic you actually are.

You will find all my posts in this matter under the tag #curbyourbernie