RE: What do you think of the concept of the ownerless "benefactor bot"?
I think that upvote bots should be not-for-profit. Pretty much all the up voting bots on here are not powering themselves up rather putting all the collected SBD to the SP donors and thus reconcentrating the SBD pool away from the small guy back to the elite whales.
Any economy that has unequal distribution of wealth is not stable and thus the problem with the larger value upvote bots.
But what if someone went ahead and created a bot for a charity then used all the SBD generated by it to power it up to a certain payout say $50. After which it started rewarding the generated SBD to contests or other ways to redistribute the SBD evenly again rather then concentrating it into one account.
I think a lot of people would rather use a up vote bot that was designed to be not for profit and it something that the @minnowsupport project or @ned should look at getting going.
Have you looked at communism yet?
I mean sever unequal distribution. Think African dictatorships. Societies with a strong middle class do the best socially.
If the top 1% has 99.5% of the wealth how does that lead to a fair economy. This is currently the issue with steem being so low. Dan is selling Steem like mad in huge quantities and he will be keeping it low until he has divested his interests which still equal millions of Steem. (3 days ago he divested 50,000 Steem but was doing much larger volumes previously when the price of Steem was better. )
For every wealthy billionaire there is on this planet how many more poor people are supporting that billionair's lifestyle? It most definitely and exponential curve and for what? Once you accumulate a certain amount of wealth your lifestyle no longer changes that much. Certainly not to justify the other people that you are keeping in poverty.
Not everyone in society has a benefactor. Oppressed groups could be given the benefactor in the form of these bots. This could mean the descendants of slavery in the US, or the native Americans, or immigrant groups who are minorities, anyone who has been historically oppressed.
It's not made to be "equal" and it's not communism. It would be perceived as "social justice" by means of capitalism and AI. Of course law enforcement and others might perceive it in a different way perhaps.
What I speak of in my post goes far beyond "upvote bots" which only live on Steem. I'm talking about bots which live on a blockchain but which are not limited to any specific blockchain, and which act as benefactors in other words, yes they could buy votes on Steem and gift the upvotes if a Steem upvote bot is selling votes to these bots.
But I'm talking about bots which can through markets, trade, etc, manifest actual gifts in the physical world. For example maybe the bot by rewarding a delivery network in Monero or Zcash, can arrange for the delivery of a brand new car to your door. Is this possible? I think not only will it be possible but it will become potentially impossible to trace.
How would you determine where the car came from or that a bunch of bots communicating online arranged for it? How would you respond? Would you get freaked out? What regulations would be effective to deal with it? How would you trace the value exchanges if it's done in truly anonymous crypto such as Monero and Zcash?
These are questions regulators haven't asked and no one seems to think about. Today an upvote on Steem by a bot translates into $. Tomorrow being loved by the bots could translate into getting anything you want manifested on your wishlist at random.
So the end result would be that they would devalue which ever cryptocurrency that they are converting into real world goods and if left to go unchecked on a large scale would not be sustainable.
Governments would likely consider it as a gift which depends on your local tax law for high end rewards. One of the questions for the companies selling the goods is are they laundering the money. If they can't prove who bought their goods that could make them suspicious to their law enforcement/government for where the money came from and also could serve as a regulating factor.
Something else to consider are those bots fundamentally different from the high frequency trading bots on the stock market? I would argue not too much.
I don't see how it would devalue anything unless you follow the labor theory of value and even then, robot labor is just as valuable as human labor. So the bots in a sense could earn crypto by providing value or not. Does mining add value for example?
I was meaning devaluation in the sense that currently most crypto's you would have to sell into another currency to get real world value for. If the currency selling outpaces the purchasing of the currency it would be devalued.
If you have a cryptocurrency that the bot is gaining and able to buy real world goods with directly then that point would be negated.
Think Zcash or Monero, these sorts of currencies would be what this sort of bot would be working with but these is no reason why this sort of bot would require only one wallet when it can have hundreds of wallets for different altcoins. It can also trade so whatever you could do to switch from one currency to another a bot could do too. The only thing it cannot do is touch fiat.