RE: What would Steemit look like if everyone chose to delegate their stake to a bid-bot?
If every one would delegate to a bid bot we would have a computer have where your goal is to earn as much money as possible. While doing so you can use every possible trick and don't have to think about ethics.
How far are we from that situation? Looks like the number of bots is still growing. Perhaps even to such a high number that the request can't keep up with. I don't think you want to know how some people play this money game? Neither do I prefer to tell you what I someone's do. But I'm not afraid of sharing any info, so I might wrote another series of posts about this subject.
I thought Steemit was meant to be a social platform. If you like you can use it for such, but you won't really earn big time. Unless you are a user of the first hour.
What possibilities are there to wipe all paid upvote bots out of Steemit?
Sounds like a lovely place to be, not!
The bot numbers grow by the week, it's insane.
Without changes at code level, 0.
And those changes at code level can those be done by witnesses? Or the Steemit owner?
The Blockchain developers - steem inc.
Application devs like busy.org and Steemit can chose how they want the front end to look - hiding bidbot voted posts for example.
I honestly never understood the influence of witnesses. But it could be their influence is very limited?
I've heard that in the post one could only post 4 blogs per day. But that's neither something that can be created by the witnesses, correct?
Witnesses choose the code to run. If everything is perfectly amenable to everyone they all run the same code.
I believe they are not all running the identical code. They independently set certain variables, for instance the proportion of SBD, Steem, and SP you are rewarded with for posts and curation.
Code is infinitely mutable, and witnesses that retain support can run any code they want. If they go 'off the reservation' they are unlikely to retain support.
Mostly they are dependent on stake-weighted votes, just like your posts, so the 37 whales that own the majority of Steem choose who they want based upon the code they are desirous of, and they choose that based on the ROI they can expect from it.
That's why choosing witnesses is important.
Thanks for your answer!
I would say that's why it's important for all 37 whales to vote for witnesses. What the remaining Steemonians do is then totally irrelevant.