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No problem Gordon. Randowhale is good. You send 1 sbd and get a random vote of between (I think) 1 and 3%. The smallest ones gets you about 1.5 back to your 1 spent and you often get 2x back. The only inconvenience is that you need to send the money while the bot is awake. When he does a certain amount of votes he goes to sleep to recover his voting power. You get get a google chrome extension that will alert you to him being awake.

Minnowbooster is always changing the amounts you can send them which is a bit of a hassle. But they never sleep, and they also give an excellent vote per $ spent. Usually something like 1.75-2x.
They do however have daily and weekly limits to how much you can spend, currently 5sbd daily and 15sbd per week.

My strategy has been to use my sbd to buy upvotes, being careful to only buy the upvotes that give the best return and to purchase that vote as close to posting my blog post as possible. If the vote comes right away after you post, you get 100% of the value. If the vote comes after 30minutes you only get 75% of the value.

If you pay 1sbd for a vote, and you receive a vote worth $2, after 7 days when it is time to pay out, the vote will split apx into 1spd and 1sp. This way rather than trading you spd in for sp you can recycle it over and over and build up your SP much more quickly.

I'm no expert, but so far it has worked well for me.

I hope you get some more time to keep posting. I'd love to see all kinds of pics from Hawaii, and more photos of your artwork!

Okay, sounds like a good plan. Thanks for the write-up. I appreciate it!