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Not sure if that is an easy fix, since this shall be a blockchain API feature. Recebtly I learned the blockchain is not able to block an account, so any spam/scam account is to be removed by flagging. And since there is not feature and/or regulation even to prevent some user interface owner to block accounts, even blocked account at one user interface may not be blocked on some other user interface (ok, you try to tackle this by Steemit.com only access).

Direct self voting may be an issue, but I think the vote buying is much more an issue, since this is a self vote, but the vote is casted by another user, and that is difficult to block, unless we make efforts to define bot voters with eg heuristic analyses and start blocking those accounts (we require this blockchain feature to block accounts first).

In the end it is us, those who create posts, and have the ability to vote, to define what Steemit will become, When none of use will buy votes from bid/voting bots, then these services will stop since no money can be made. We have to drive culture, that is in a nutshell what I wanted to say :)

Owwww, well, when we cannot drive the culture into good directions, we may move to some other social network I'm sure some Steemit look-a-likes are in the planning!

All good API's have keys for applications.
It is simply saying that only 1 or 2 valid keys, they can execute the function.

Has nothing to do with blocking an account.
It really is a simple fix. But, the witnesses who make the most off of vote buying, scheduled votes and etc. don't want to fix it.

Has nothing to do with blocking an account.

Correct, should nt have brought it into the conversation, but it shows how little is build into the blockchain APIs.

It really is a simple fix.

I guess you mean the self vote, the vote a user can give to its own post or comment? This will stop the issue of too much self voting (I personally am not against self voting, but everything shall be in balance, maybe 80/20 rule, 80% to others 20% to yourself). With another account the fix you talk about can be bypassed again, and those who understand how Steemit works will adopt such strategy. We can savely assume most of the powerful Steemians in terms of SP, know how Steemit works.

No. I mean the upvote. The same function whether you are upvoting an article/comment for yourself or someone else.

Vote
steem.broadcast.vote(wif, voter, author, permlink, weight, function(err, result) { console.log(err, result); });

There would have to be away to make sure that only valid votes come directly from steemit.com.

Hmmm, not sure if I understand why this would solve what issue. What do you mean with a valid vote? A vote by a human?

In case you mean to say the Steem Blockchain shall only allow certain interfaces to allow access to the blockchain, or only certain interfaces to allow to use certain functions of the blockchain (such as the upvote), then the Blockchain shall implement application identification, verification and permission management for Apps. I think when restricting the Blockchain to only allow Steemit.com to access the blockchain and use the upvote function, this may indeed be a way to drive towards more manual vote (well, some kind of captcha needs to be implemented in the Steemit.com UI to prevent bots); However, the whole idea of the Steem blockchain is not to limit the user interfaces to just 1. Actually, when limiting the blockchain to only one user interface for voting, this could actually harm the Steem value as well, since the system becomes a closed system, rather than an open system. I personally would like to see research and development done around automatic detection of bots. In eg Telecommunication networks, systems are used to detect eg bots sending spam SMS injected into the mobile networks through various difference interfaces, including (and mostly) though the mobile interface, ie using a SIM card. These systems uses heuristic analyses and are becoming more and more self learning to detect bots versus human use. Such systems work with at least a 2 level approach: 1) system detects suspicious traffic and block those users/apps/number that are 100% identified as bots 2) when not 100% sure, than the detected traffic is passed to a human team for human based analyses and decision. Whatever these teams sees, are feed back as much as possible into the detection algorithms to increase the detection quality and increase the automatic decision making. This is the way to go imho.

However, first we - as the community - need to determine we do not want to have bots voting. That in itself will require many of us to not want bots voting; Something we can try to figure out what the community wants, but I suppose this can easily be be blocked since many of the high SP holders are earning more than ever because we have the vote bots in our community. These users are monetising their SP through renting out their SP to all these bid/vote bots, and earn more money than they could ever earn when the would adopt manual curation/voting.

when limiting the blockchain to only one user interface for voting, this could actually harm the Steem value

Right now, bots are hurting Steem value, because it can be seen as scamming the system.

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