RE: Downvote Pool Deep Dive
I am not sure that bid bots are really a problem aside from creating envy. Someone's 2 minute blog of junk may earn 1000x more than an 8 hour blog of well researched findings, and of course there is a risk that anyone who bids too much could be crushed by a whale and lose their investment-while the bid bots still benefits. The few whales who come in the name of fairness wanting to help crush the bid bots I doubt will achieve the results they want. It may prove just to be the death knell to the block chain and their own investments.
I am not sure how this help makes things more fair if the bid bots disappear [supposing the price and floating circulation of steem remained unaffected, which it wouldn't], those of us who don't use them will still get about the same amount of votes and earnings.
Those who operate the bid bots, I presume, are keeping a big chunk of the Steem out of circulation. To shut them down would likely cause these bidbot owners to dump their Steem and flood the marketplace...for 13 weeks. If there is a mass dump it is going to hurt steem as an investment....for 13 weeks. One can't blame the people who have started to powerdown, it's is going to likely make steem extremely cheap to buy in the future for the companies failure to protect market value. Maybe this is what the whales want is to buy more on the cheap and have an even greater influence. The abusive whales, who likewise can buy more at a discount, will try to purge more and more people from the platform for an ideological differences causing them to be a greater problem than they are now. Sure the little guys could buy more too, but the little guys aren't earning 6 figures a year and could still be swallowed whole by the abusive whales off the platform. Even if an ordinary person had $10000 extra to spend during the crash, steem would be too much risk as an investment and depending on how low steemit went when they bought in they could still be swallowed whole by an abusive whale. For people in the 3rd world, they stand even less of a chance.
There are threats on the horizon; What steem cofounder Dan (Now of EOS and MEOS )says can kill steemit. Who knows if there is any truth to what Dan says, other than the current [lack of] leadership of steem. If the [lack of] leadership allows such changes to destroy the market value of steem, the MEOS (or whatever it is called) can ensure that by buying enough steem at a discounted rate they can destroy steem's primary utility internally and basically kill steemit.