berniesanders and his heroes

It is a fine irony that the account is named after Bernie Sanders, a hard left US politician, who is promoting "Democratic Socialism". As too many today and in the past had to learn, Socialism can be named "Democratic", or "Liberal" or "Leninist", the result is always the same: Lies, denunciation, robbery, decline, murder and gulags. In short, tyranny.

And so it is also the program of berniesanders here on Steemit to say the one thing and do the other. To promote fairness and promise prosperity while at the same time killing off the trust on the platform and destroying the very base on which his own success is build on.

In this post, I will show you how nextgencrypto, the user behind berniesanders, and about a dozen of other users shamelessly run amok on Steemit with their "flagwars", which they deem as necessary to end "reward pool rape". They are provoking those wars and I claim they do this not to improve the experience for everyone here on Steemit, but only to further their own reward pool rape. And their main tool for this are upvote bots.

I used to be a fan of upvote bots, but that attitude changed dramatically

Not too long ago, I detailed in this post why I think that upvote bots - not all of them, but most - are not levelling the playing field by enabling small users to climb to the top of the "hot" and "trending" list a category. They do much more the opposite of that by draining a significant share of the overall paid rewards by the system. This keeps the bulk of users small and therefore depending on the bots.

For sure, it does work to purchase an upvote to get a post into the trending or hot sections. But the consequence in the most cases is that users don't win with such a deal. It may look like that at the beginning, because the payout numbers displayed look like much more than they have invested. At the end tough as I and many others have made the experience, the bottom line of the deal is negative. All you do is loose money. The winners on the other hand are always the upvote bots. On top, most users I believe focus on their feed and do not look at random posts. It is unlikely to find a big user there who might give you a valuable upvote.

As they say: "the bank always wins". This is surely also case with upvote bots. Important to mention is that there are several bots, which also accept Steem Power delegations from normal users. I know three of them: @minnowbooster, @boomerang and @smartsteem. They are not the bots I am talking about, because they at least redistribute the money made with the upvote business back to the community. There is nothing wrong with that. You still have a negative turnout as an individual user, but they are not hazardous for Steemit as the other ones that are ran by closed circles.

The really problematic bots are much more the ones that are ran by whales.

When researching this issue I had to rely on what Steemworld was offering me in statistics. I don't know how to access the blockchain directly, which is why I may have missed some of the big bots. Overall, I found nine bots with the following specifications:

• They have very big SP delegations (~ 500k or more).
• They are ran by one user or a closed group of users (the biggest has six delegators).

These nine upvote bots are: @appreciator, @booster, @buildawhale, @jerrybanfield, @postpromoter, randowhale, @rocky1, @upme and @upmyvote. The owner of @appreciator is unknown (all payments directly go to @bittrex; its witness proxy is @bluemist), randowhale is ran by six users (@livingfree, nextgencrypto, @thecyclist, @kushed, @engagement, @ozchartart) and @jerrybanfield is a bit of a special case since it's not exclusively a bot, but also a normal account. The others are all owned by each one user.

When analysing their payments, I was shocked!

The upvote business is following the usual fluctuations. Some days are better than others and sometimes a user really wants to go for it with an upvote. But overall, the market volume is relatively stable over time. I have only looked at a short period, but my hunch is that the market is growing.

What I did was looking at the money transfers that go away from these bots that aren't related with an upvote request to see if, how much and where the profits from the upvote business are going. Here are the results, which are the estimated daily averages from last week:

Upvote Bot	Million Steem Power	Daily $ Transfer To Holding Account	Holding Account	$ Transfers To The Owner	Owner	Normal 7 Day Rewards For The Account
@appreciator	1.4	1000	@bittrex	-	-	2.5
@booster	0.8	1500	@bittrex	500	@inertia	0.01
@buildawhale	1.8	1600	@alpha	100	themarkymark	190
@jerrybanfield	0.5	250	@budgets	150	@jerrybanfieldroi	120
@postpromoter	2.5	1600	@freedom	80	@yabapmatt	0.25
randowhale	0.4	50	randowhalefund	200	@livingfree, nextgencrypto, @thecyclist, @kushed, @engagement, @ozchartart	0
@rocky1	0.5	450	@freedom	-	@suggeelson?	0
@upme	1.5	2200	@freedom	30	@suggeelson	0
@upmyvote	0.4	400*	-	-	themarkymark	0.09
Sum	~10	~9000	-	~1000	-	~320

*No transfers to a holding account; the number is an average of overall incoming minus outgoing transfers.

You can see three very relevant things in this table:

1. Most of the money goes to the holding accounts of the owners or directly to @bittrex. It is only 10% that go to the pockets of the owners main accounts (where the extra Steem Power gets induced again into the system via upvotes).
2. The expected rewards for normal rewarded activities of posting, commenting and strangely also upvoting is in the most cases near zero, the exception here being @jerrybanfield and @buildawhale.
3. The profits are massive! In total all nine bots are earning their owners a whopping 10000$ per day! (at current prices that is about 25000 US-$)

In the most cases, the bots receive SBD, but in some cases also Steem. But I should mention that in the text I am using SBD, SP and the $ sign deliberately. In case there is a $ in the text, I am not sure what is meant, SBD or SP or maybe both. We should always keep in mind that there is a difference between the two, although for this analysis it is not really important, because both currencies are paid as rewards and they have about the same value per coin in US-$.

The sheer size of the upvote business becomes clear when comparing it to the overall reward pool and users like @haejin, @sweetsssj and @allasyummyfood

Here are the numbers for the expected seven day rewards for upvoting, posting and commenting and the share of these three users of the overall reward pool (note: it's possible that berniesanders hasn't flagged the posts yet, so the actual payouts might be smaller):

User	Expected $ Rewards For Seven Days	Daily Average For Expected $ Rewards	Share Of The Overall Reward Pool in %
@haejin	9089	1298	1.27
@sweetsssj	416	59	0.058
@allasyummyfood	969	138	0.135
Sum	~10500	~1500	~1.46

@haejin is engaged in a permanent flagging war with berniesanders. Not too long ago, @sweetsssj has been accused of a very evil crime by berniesanders and got also flagged by him and his likes and @allasyummyfood apparently has been caught in the cross fire of - again - berniesanders rage against another user just the other day. This phenomenon seems to be a commonplace these days, as the example of @sirlunchthehost shows.

You can derive the overall amount of the reward pool from the individual shares of the three users. In total, currently the system pays out about 100,000 $ (meaning SBD+Steem) every day and the three get out a combined 1.46% or 1500$ per day, of which the bulk goes to @haejin. A lot, fore sure and you may argue it is too much, especially in the case of @haejin. But is the amount really system critical and are they the worst?

Here is the interesting part: The three users get their share per week while the bots make their money per day!

The rewards are displayed in a very transparent fashion on Steemit and also on stats sites for Steemit. The size of the bot business on Steemit is on the other hand more or less hidden. And I guess that is why it can be easily overlooked that @haejin and other very successful Steemians are not the biggest "thieves" on the platform, but it is in fact the upvote bots, respectively their owners.

The daily profits made by these three users are around 1500$ per day and if you like their content or not, they still do have to put some serious work into it. The owners of the nine upvote bots in contrast make a combined 10000$ per day and take away 10% of the reward pool (and more through other activities) and they do not have to do anything else beyond setting up the bot in the first place and equipping it with enough Steem Power.

Again: Day in and day out, upvote bots are ripping off at least 10% of the rewards of this platform! Just alone the mentioned ones are 7 times as big as the three users who got attacked because of "reward pool rape".

I believe, this is not irony but calculation and a blatant attempt to rip off (and kill off?) Steemit and its most successful users

• Fact 1: There is only a limited amount of SBD and Steem every day that gets distributed throughout the system.

• Fact 2: Content of very successful users gets flagged by owners of powerful upvote bots to reduce their share of the reward pool.

• Fact 3: A lot of small users use upvote bots, despite it being a bad deal for them.

• Fact 4: Less than a dozen upvote bots suck up most of the distributed rewards making some users filthy rich, while leaving most of the platform dry. (The holding accounts have almost no outgoing transactions.)

• Fact 5: Owners of these upvote bots are either indifferent towards flagging because of "reward pool rape" or they are sympathetic towards it - or they engage it on a daily base!

The Gretchenfrage is: What happens when you kill off the successful users and you have hundreds or thousands of small users who already engage in buying upvotes, and now thanks to the flagging of successful users, they have a little bit of a higher share of the reward pool?

Personally, I am convinced they will transform this more in rewards into bigger upvotes. In other words, they transfer the money directly to the upvote bots OWNED BY THE FLAGGERS!

The flagging excesses by nextgencrypto/berniesanders and others is not charitable, it is criminal activity!

I am sure, the accused will claim to have different motives. But please, explain me how the described mechanism is not a reality. How do you ensure that the rewards raped from @sweetsssj are not ending up in your pockets? What is your justification to take the rewards away on the end of successful users - who put a lot of work in their posts - just to put that money and much more of the rewards in your own pockets via your upvote bot scam? What value do your upvote bots have for the platform again?

Purchasing upvotes is surely not improving the "proof-of-brain" concept behind Steem. It's more like numbing the brain.

To me it is beyond perfidious that you present yourself as the great Robin Hoods of Steemit who are "just trying to restore justice to the distribution of the reward pool", when in reality you use this masquerade to rip off the platform even more than you would be doing it without flagging successful users.

The upvote bots are not improving the platform, but they are your main tool to rip off and destroy. It is as I wrote in the beginning: You claim to intend the one thing just to do the opposite instead. You promise fairness and prosperity, but at the end, you will destroy the very base your own success was made possible with in the first place.

On top comes the fact that most the bot owners also run witnesses. Thanks to their voting power they can simply vote for themselves. The position of witnesses brings them in another load of money. All they have to do to retain their position as witness is to go on voting for themselves and make sure they can grab enough of the future reward inflation.

Their ends are covered, but are also the ends of Steemit covered as a whole?

• What if these bot owners go on growing their share of the daily rewards due to the ever flourishing upvote business?
• What if they go on flagging important users and drive them away?
• What if the rewards for the bulk of users stays in the range of 0.1$ and 2$?
• What if investors stop or don't start believing in Steem in the first place, because they see morons running the servers and raging through the platform?
• What if the value of Steem doesn't go up, because there is no reason that makes it a good concept - but plenty of reasons that make it bad deal?

I am absolutely convinced that as long as there are upvote bots ran by closed circles, as long as the flagging of important users goes on and as long as there are short-sighted hotheads populating the witness ranks, Steem and Steemit are in grave danger. And the longer it takes to change these three aspects, the more likely it is that the Steem blockchain will die.

Maybe it takes another year, maybe two. But after that, there will be enough disgruntled and disappointed users - and there will be competition waiting to take them in.

What competent witnesses should do about it

In the first place, this supposed moral flagging must be stopped. Within the current system it is impossible to bring it to a hold. The only way is to counter-flag. But as the permanent flag wars between berniesanders and @hajin and others shows, counter-flagging will only escalate. That is why we need a system level approach to take away the justification for this kind of flagging. On top it also needs tools for a more tempered way of telling somebody you don't like their content.

This - as well as the aspect of upvote bots in general - must be dealt with. Witnesses don't hold the key to this, it is the Steemit developers and especially @ned who are the ones capable of making changes.

But witnesses are the most system critical users on Steemit. You have more power than you might think, or made believe to have. You should approach @ned and make him aware of the issue and please don't stop annoying him about it! He must listen to you, because you effectively run his system.

He may be able to replace you, but is this really in his interest? Getting rid of his most experienced generals, just like Stalin did? I think a good part of the witnesses are save from such a fate.

Approaching and annoying @ned won't be enough. You also need concrete alternatives for how to deal with the issues at hand. Namely:

• How to limit extremely high reward pool payouts if they are persistent and this without harming the system, its successful users and concept of Steemit as a whole.
• How to keep the ability to flag spam and scams and to show users that you don't like their content (or the payout for it), without damaging the social behaviour on the platform.
• How to put bots (also upvote bots) to good use without them growing into vacuum cleaners for the reward pool (although, that might be done without system level changes; see below).

Identifying problems of that kind, developing solutions for them and successfully(!) bringing them to the attention of the developers is part of your job as witnesses.

What whales with an interest in the future of Steemit (and the value of their wallet) can do about it

It is important to stop those upvote bots from draining the reward pool which are ran by closed circles who don't put the money back into the system. Ending upvote bots as a whole isn't possible so far, but it is possible to stop this highly damaging aspect of the reward pool getting drained every day. As mentioned above, there are several upvote bots that also take small delegations by random users and therefore distribute the profits from the business in a much more preferable way back to the platform.

If users would only purchase upvotes from them, I think we would make a big step forward. This would not only help the reward pool distribution, but also end the ever growing flagging power by the notorious bot owners.

This is why I think whales should threaten to flag users who buy upvotes from one the nine bots from above or from other closed circle bots if they buy there again. Instead, you can tell them that using the alternatives @minnowbooster, @smartsteem and @boomerang is ok. In case they don't listen, you flag.

The method is very simple and in the most cases, a threat should be sufficient. My guess is that in maybe 10% of the cases, a downvote will be necessary. It will cost you in the short run, but in the long run, you and we all will profit from it.

What stats services like Steemworld can do about it

Right now, it is visible for everyone how much a user can expect in rewards including the percentage of the total reward pool. To this number, there should be added a second number that gives out the bottom-line of all transactions in and out from every account per day plus the percentage of that number relative to the entire transaction volume of Steemit.

This would give everyone enough of a glimpse to see who really has the financial power in his hands on Steemit.

What you, the normal user, can do about it

Not much, but still two things. The first one is not to buy upvotes anymore in general, but if you can't stop doing so, refrain from using closed circle bots. The three mentioned open ones are offering a good enough upvote value for your money.

The second thing are your votes for witness. The system is organized like a stock company, which means that your voting power is equivalent to the Steem Power you have. That's why as a single user, your power is very limited. Nonetheless, you should vote. There are very competent witnesses and your vote may help just a little but it does help. Alternatively, there is the possibility to set a proxy for your votes for witness (go to the bottom of this page to pick one). You should do so if you don't have enough information to pick your own witnesses.

As a third alternative for your witness votes, I am currently working on a project called Witness Quality Rating with the account @witness-qr. It is intended to become a proxy for witness votes and aims to bring transparency to the way witnesses are chosen. Right now, this still highly depends on informal information and a lot of guess work. @witness-qr wants to change this by creating a list of questions directed to the witnesses and candidates for witness, by which they will be rated. The goal is to find out objectively, who are the most competent candidates and only they will receive a vote by @witness-qr. So far, I am still working on the project, but you can read the Whitepaper draft to see if it is something for you.

This cancer can be beaten!

The reward pool rape by bots, the erratic flagging and also the lack of transparency behind the scenes of this platform are negative for the user experience and very damaging for Steemit. The effects can be fatal for the whole project, but this does not have to be. We can do something about it. We just have to do it systematically and use all tools we have at our disposal.

Thanks for reading this post and please let me know your opinion in the comment section!

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