I don't think bidbots have anything to do with delegation. The act of selling votes would still happen even without it.

Fair point but because it's automatic through delegation it has become a lot easier to do so.

Why bother curating and getting 25% of your votes back, when you can delegate and passively get ~90%? Sure that's the current situation and clearly bots are here to stay, but is it really good for the network? Your arguments about how it's a positive thing for the STEEM token value (coins being locked, authors buying sbd on markets, etc) are valid, but what is the value of that compared to the original vision of steem to 'rank the web' and create something truly world-changing? Look at the steemit trending, 100% of it is through bidbot usage, and a large percentage of those are advertising very questionable schemes (see current top post about ormus).

I believe the solution is already worked on in the form of SMT's. With 1P1V and oracles. I see this period now as a transition period until SMT's come out. It's a rough ride for some of us. But when I think about this blockchain 3 years from now no-one will remember this period. Just like almost no-one remembers n^2 and just steemit.com. People will just earn SMT with content creation and trade them for STEEM.

You also say that those bidbots are good for minnows so they can give themselves a push, but remember that they need to pay money for that. Before bid bots, we technically truly helped minnows, out of pure generosity. Now it's a PAID service, I don't think it's right to call it 'helping the minnows'. Minnows are just forced into doing it, because it's the current top strategy for them, and growing through networking and good content like before isn't possible. Those bidbots actually advertise themselves like that, but it's a huge lie in my views.

I don't call it helping the minnows. I call it a tool to promote content. The tool has a negative ROI (in general).

If we want bidbots to be legit and rename them to 'promotion services', then a lot of work needs to be done on the UIs to warn people about which posts or videos are promoted, just like on any other social networks.

However I believe that the current need of steem power holders to delegate to bid bots stems from too low returns from curation. Also the lack of peg on SBD keeps on pushing the author/curator split more and more in favor of authors, reducing curation rewards, and making people more likely to want to 'sell their votes' instead.

I think the problem now is that investors have now been shown a better and easier way to earn ROI. Not everyone likes to curate. I don't think it's realistic to think that investors would all of the sudden start to curate when you increase the incentive to do so. It's just to much work.

Again I believe SMT's will solve a lot of these things in the future and I can't wait for them to come out.