Just some food for thought and interested in hearing other people's perspective on this. So many people dislike the use of bots on Steemit. Many people say it allows whales to earn without having to be active and engaged on the platform. It causes garbage content to consume the Trending and Hot pages, etc, etc, etc.

I was curious of a couple questions...

1. Could bots be stopped through a hard fork? Is it even possible for a hard fork to stop people from being able to use bots?

2. What effect would stopping the use of bots have on Steemit?

If Bots Weren't Allowed Would the Price of Steemit Tank?

I thought this was something interesting to think about. While I personally am not a huge fan of bots, I think blocking the use of bots, if that's even possible, could potentially cause the price of Steem and SBD to tank and could suck a lot of money out of the market.

As @brianphobos had alluded to in his post about @yallapapi this morning, he said many whales are just passive users. They use voting bots to keep a passive income comming in but don't really post, rarely actively vote, and aren't really engaged in the day to day drama of the platform.

While many of us may initially think getting rid of bots could be a positive thing, myself included, I also could see it hurting the platform, at least temporarily.

Here's how. So if through a hard fork bots could no longer be used, again if that's even possible, all the sudden you have all these whale accounts with lots of money with no incentive to stay on the platform. They don't want to be actively engaged, they've already made a lot of money, why let it sit here in Steemit if its not passively earning for them so I would forsee a lot of them cashing out.

We also have all these bot accounts whether it be upvote bots, resteem bots, etc, etc, etc. All these accounts would no longer serve a purpose either so I would see them cashing out as well. Now I think the whales have a lot more Steem than voting bots but none the less there's a lot of voting bots.

Bots have become such a large part of Steemit that if we were to cut them off I think we would see a lot of money exit the platform. As is the way supply and demand works when supply goes up and demand goes down prices go down, when supply goes down and demand goes up prices rise.

Now if we were to see whale accounts and bot accounts start dumping huge sums of Steem on the Steemit Marketplace as well as theopen market that would cause the price to tank. When the price tanks people on the platform become less engaged andspend less time on the platform so there's less users, less content and less quality content. That's another thing I notice is when earnings goes down so does the quality of posts...people are like yeah if I'm only going to earn XYZ I'll post some memes instead of long form or quality content. When less users come on and quality of posts go down there's less reason to be on here.

Anyhow, as you can see it could potentially cause a chain effect of less users, less quality content and a further slide in price.

Just curious your thoughts on this issue? Drop a comment below