The curious case of vote investment. Vote buying, there is no problem.

               Vote abuse, vote abuse, grab your torches and lets rant about it in immeasurable amounts of posts using the guise of self-awareness and self-deprecation to rack in as much money as possible, all while knowing full well why nothing changes. I guess that sums it up, satire right guys, I did the satire because I'm insinuating that we're villagers with torches and stuff, fun. For real though, I am not knocking anyone for writing about abuse as... well I'm doing it right now. Discussion is important, so by all means continue torching.

Thing is,

I have been thinking about this recently and came across what seems like a bit of a loophole in the vote bot problem. Not a loophole that makes it easier to get away with, not a loophole in particular, maybe a wormhole since you seem to end up right where you start. Now for the sake of argument, lets say that the problem is the ability to vote buy at all. Its not about timing it really late, and especially not about how individuals choose to vote with their own SP.

In saying that, I'm also going to ignore SP that was acquired without it being bought somewhere along the way, so SP generated from massive @ned delegations will not be a part of this. To summarize:

• grumpy's fascist late voting grievances - don't care
• rancho and bernie doing whatever they want with their SP - don't care
• upvote bots using generated SP from delegations not rooted in purchased Steem - don't care

What remains? Well, what remains is the ability for people to send SBD or Steem to someone with lots of SP who will then upvote them with a weight above the asking price. The most critical piece of information to look into is the seller's SP, because this SP is the result of investment which understandably grants the investor more power, as he is more staked in the system. The seller has done what is considered one of the correct courses of action, either buying or earning stake, with money being a point of equivalency.

In a true capitalism, money needs to literally have an equivalency in absolutely everything. This is what makes it possible for work to earn the same sort of stake that money can buy right. It also ought to mean that I should be able to buy muscles at the same rate that my time spent in the gym to earn them is objectively valued, but that's another thought for another day.

Back to the SP of the seller, he has no system imposed reason to reserve his votes, and can use them as he wants. Remember that I do not consider this a problem in this argument, it is simply a fact as of now. This means that if someone was to send the seller money to be upvoted, there would be no reason to either upvote them or not. Contrary to how it's talked about, the upvote is completely independent of the bid or buy. This doesn't solve anything but still, it seems to matter quite a bit later on.

The obvious reason the schemes all work is because the SP's strength, the amount of money generated from an upvote, is not linearly correlated with the amount of SP. An investment of 20 dollars does not give you a 20 dollar vote. As an investor or vote seller buys SP, they are assuming a risk, a very large risk. If you can spend 20 dollars on a single vote worth a total of 21 dollars, all while 50% is returned to you and does not assume risk, why would you invest in SP which will take much too long to return that 20 bucks. Even if the upvote was worth less than 20 dollars, the return is fast and brings other factors such as getting listed on trending. All I'm saying is, if you wanted to spend money on Steem to get more Steem, you'd naturally look toward whatever option has the closest monetary equivalency. With vote bots in existence, there is little incentive to spend smaller amounts of money directly on SP. It could even be argued that logically, no matter how much money you have to invest, it still makes more sense to route it through vote bots. This doesn't take into consideration that ROI comes from consensus based voting on individual posts but who cares, it's like that either way.

We know all this, if it wasn't the better option, nobody would do it and nobody would complain about it. Whatever, lets set up some easier way to think about it.

Parameters and logical progression

• You can buy or earn SP
• By buying SP, you support the platform
• Support of the platform means you convert value, fiat/non-steem to steem/SP
• Increasing investment involves having more money to convert
• Voting is subjective and independent

Since voting is subjective and independent, the system cannot rely on the voter curating properly. The only aspect the system can rely on completely to increase value is the conversion of external/liquid monetary sources into SP. The problem of vote bidding was what again? People spending liquid money on a vote which hopes to convert 50% earnings into SP(good) and give more money to investor to invest(good). Otherwise, with sheer good-post-writing skills, no liquid money is introduced into the system. Not conclusive enough, we must continue down the rabbit hole.

It is not definite what will happen to the liquid money after being introduced. Since, as we established above, voting is independent, then the sending of money to an investor does not influence where their vote will go. Down this route, the entire thing unravels and we have to conclude that there is no problem in the first place.

Instead, if we assume that the introduction of liquid money into the system is inherently good (buying Steem or SBD so you can use the upvote bots), then the best option for the system all things considered(maybe not) is for people to buy votes, and for investors to do what they will, the system hoping that any amount of the liquid buy money is converted into SP. The best option is of course for the buyer to spend all of it on SP, but let me explain just why this option is automatically a worse option for the buyer/creator.

Doesn't it all come back to a monetary equivalency, work = money. The following may be a bit controversial, but the end goal of a post is upvotes. Upvotes signify the equivalent exchange between work and money, yet ironically since the equivalency is transient, what ends up happening is that you spend money(your time) to make money(paper). Since you already have the paper on hand and it is supposedly equivalent to the work, the paper will always lead the creator to their end goal faster than the time, I mean literally, faster than the time. There will always be some work involved to offset the theoretical pure equivalency. Spending money directly on SP is always a negative in this scenario, it just turns out that someone did it already. The problem is that work is used to buy the same upvote that money can, the entire basis of this platform. From this vantage point, the problem has no solution since it would require there to be no platform, hence that there is no problem... again.

Conclusion

I've tried

There is no problem, the system wants vote buying, if the steem blockchain was an AI, it would probably endorse it. The system man, it's the system, it cannot tell what good curation is or how erratic human behavior will shift value. It simply moves toward the safest and most logical conclusion, the problem itself.

There, I solved it. I would like breakfast now.