RE: Bid bots are being used not enough = maximum profit
Assuming that you're receiving 50% in Steam Power and 50% in SBD then your calculations are correct. I would suggest to take 100% in Steem Power and power down once a week. I think profit would be better.
So my final result is a profit of 1.18 SBD on an investment of 3 SBD. That is a ROI of 39% while the bot has a maximum ROI of 10%
Bot's are not taking into consideration the fact that you're going to power down and trade STEEM back to SBD with some extra profit.
why are the bots not being used enough to at least absorp/use all available voting power?
Your example is not very valid because you only used 3 SBD to pay for bots. Try few more bids and check results. It may be easy to make some small profit with small bids. But it's definetly not as profitable as it used to be once price of STEEM has been higher.
From an ethical point of view I believe Steemit should NOT have any bid bots.
Why not? We've 3 ways of promoting ourselfs (making sure that we're going to end up on trending page and get some extra traffic):
- pay directly to steemit (steem is being burned) and we end up in 'promoted' tab.
- use bots
- be wealthy whale
Choice is very easy. People either will use bots or Steemit will turn into ghost town because majority of bloggers will abandon this platform (if bots would be not allowed).
There is no other choice.
Yours
Piotr