For long, I've been a critique of the bidbot scheme.

To understand its inner workings takes time and also a large amount of engaged-action.

Action meaning: getting your hands dirty.

For a glance into the bidbot economy, you must post and buy votes from them. Simple as that.

"Where is the origin of such massive voting power?" That is what you soon get to ask yourself.

How can a bidbot hold a vote value of nearly 200 STEEM as of @therising or @smartsteem?

Most of their voting power comes from DELEGATION.

And why would someone delegate its own voting power?

Many users have significant holdings in STEEM but have no time to use its associated voting-power to curate posts in the platform.

If you delegate SteemPower to a BidBot, it will do the "curation" job for you. In return, bidbots promise you 100% of your daily vote-power, all back to you.

How is that? Hold with me, and you will understand it all.

If you don't upvote posts (if you don't curate the Steem platform) you get no curation rewards.

If you don't post, you never get an Author Reward.

And that is something to understand. Inactive users get no share from the so-called Pool Rewards.

What are Pool Rewards?

Every block created in the Steemit Platform produces a block reward. Part of it is given to the Witnesses, and the rest goes entirely to pay the posts. The "Pool Rewards" = "Total amount of Post Rewards paid to all posts."

(Who are "The Witnesses"? Those are the guys holding a full copy of the Steemit blockchain, and keeping the platform up and running. They entirely deserve their pay)

Keep in mind: Every Post Reward is divided into 'Author Reward' (75%) and 'Curation Reward' (25%).

Post Rewards = Author Reward + Curation Reward

When a post gets votes, it is assigned a piece of the Pool Reward. The amount of Rewards a post gets depends not only on the number of votes but also on the weight of each vote.

The vote Weight depends on the user's Steem Power (SP), and here come the bidbots.

BidBots have a lot of SP delegated to them. So, their vote is hefty. A single 100% vote from @therising is worth ~200 STEEM in value.

@therising will only vote for you if you buy it. Meaning: You have to transfer some STEEM to @therising (check for the list of bidbots at https://steembottracker.com).

beautiful whales...

Is that it? Just it?

Not at all! As soon as you start buying votes, you see there is a strategy you need to follow to receive a vote which actually pays off. (I will try to talk about that in some other post of the series).

Given the current situation, you can only reach the trending page if you buy bid-votes.

(Indeed, that is a sad fact in my view)

When you see a post which will get a 100$ payout, you think... How is that possible?

The answer is: BidBots.

Bingo!

But, don't be a fool. The Author is not going to cash in 100$ in gain. No!

First of all, 25% of it will go to the curators (the people who upvoted the post). This is not going to be divided equally between all curators. There is a mechanics around it. When to vote (in time) matters a lot in here.

(For example, The calculation is such that, if you vote in the first minutes after the release of a post, you might get more curation rewards (also according to your Vote-Power). Meaning, if you "discover" and upvote a good post before it goes to the trending page, you might get more rewards than the people voting at latter days.)

So, 75$ will end up being paid to the Author. Great! Nice gain!

Hum... Not that easy.

Most likely, the Author spent close to 75$ buying votes from BidBots. If the Author does it all right, and try to buy winning votes, he may end up having some 10% to 15% gain. In the best scenario, an author spends around 65$ in bidbots, and get a 75$ payout. Meaning a net 10$ profit after the curation cap.

A 10$ gain sounds not bad. But, remember, this depends on many active-actions from the writer's side.

• First of all, to write a decent post.
• Follow the bidbots at https://steembottracker.com
• Choose the right bots, and choose the right time to buy the vote
• Avoid buying loser votes (when you spend more then you earn from a bot).

There is a lot of time you have to dedicate to achieve that. Is it worth it? Maybe, in the long run, to build a community around you. But to do that, you need decent posts. Otherwise, you never get votes from real users. And that is what may really boost your future gains.

To conclude! Part I

If your vote-value = 0.1$ and you delegate it to @therising, you will get around 2.4$ every day. That is because every user has ten 100% votes to be used every day. Actually, that is one 100% vote every 2.4 hours. So, you give them your vote power, and they will give you back, 100% of it.

They are so generous!

Not that much. Check this out:

To conclude! Part II (Yhea, Part II will talk more about that all)

Who gets the Curation Rewards?

BidBots!

And they get it clean (most of them). No cuts. They have the most powerful votes, so they get most of the curation rewards from all trending/hot posts.

They get it all guys! That is it. That is why they are so generous in giving you back 100% of the voting power you delegate to them.

As an example, @therising has 3.2 Million Steem delegated to it. Imagine how much curation reward is being drained by this solo bot. All the curation coming out of his votes, go entirely to a single bot.

Those bidbots are making huge money out of the Steemit platform.

Some smaller bots are trying to get more attention, offering to payback both the vote-power + post-reward. But for now I know only one, @spydo, but I confess I never tested it to check for the payouts.

And that is part of what I call as # "Steemit friction."

Steemit friction! This bunch of small details which are holding us all. Making it harder and harder to grow communities. Actually, this is part of a huge potential holding back our own motivation to invest time and writing soul to the Steemit platform.

I will be posting about the Steemit friction for a while (I guess). And I hope this motivates a better understanding of Steemit for us all.

But you know? Guess what: Publish0x

I just found Publish0x. And there are no bidbots around there. The system does not allow them to flourish there.

There might be no such friction at Publish0x, and no drain of curation rewards.

I still need to test Medium. Although Medium is not blockchain based, it also has no friction coming from the bidbots mechanics.

I hope you guys reading this post find a minute to add some thoughts.

See you next post!

bb

ps. I will try to make this post go to the trending page. Just check it out next days. (So, I will show what I really mean about buying votes to go trend)

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