The SteemIt Self Vote as an investment strategy.

Disclaimer: I'm still a little new here... so some of my understanding of the system's loopholes, protections, and the like may be incomplete. I always welcome corrections and additional information, but please provide sources for it as well or else I can't tell fact from belief.

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I was in the bathroom this morning, where all of the best thoughts originate, considering SteemIt. In particular, the value of a vote and the value of investing actual money into the system. These thoughts were inspired by another post I was reading, where someone was challenging the suggestions that the SteemIt system is a Ponzi scheme to which I agree, it doesn't seem to be. But all of that aside, it got me thinking of the self vote.

I was considering how a vote is, essentially, "free". There's no cost to the user to make one, only a limit to how many they can make in a day without the distribution of "value" becoming thinned. This doesn't even reduce their overall "value" of the initial 10 votes... only distributes it over a wider spread. 10 votes at $1 per vote or 1000 votes at $0.01 per vote is still $10.

$10 they could just give themselves. For free. Literally free money.

Invest enough money in STEEM and you could make a post (probably about how you've gamed SteemIt to roll in some sick cash), have 0 followers, self vote only, and still make money. But how much?

This I didn't know, so I set off to find out. I came across this hand dandy little site that calculates the value of 1 vote by any account. Pretty neat... so lets see some numbers!

We'll start with me... a month in, account estimated value of $100 or so, and 69.280 STEEM Power. Not much... and a super low vote value of $0.0036 or so.

Now comes the math...

(((0.0036/69.280)100)10)*365
This calculates an APY for my "investment" were I to self-vote 10 times every day. Obviously with such small numbers were not going to see much actual money, but the APY is just under 19%. To put that in some perspective Bankrate shows 5 year CD APYs as 2.5%. This doesn't even factor in the effect of compounding value, or votes from other people which may trickle in.

An obvious catch here is that 25% of that upvote power would be distributed to other users, but we're still talking over a 10% APY. And, I'm one of those other voters, instantly voting which means the reverse auction gives 99% of the curation reward back to the author. On top of that, again because of the reverse auction, if I did this with 9 other bot accounts I had created which instantly upvoted it in the first seconds, I would likely still retain close to 90% of that 25%. And if no one else ever voted on me (remember, 0 followers) I could of course keep 100% of it.

So what happens when we take this to some larger numbers?

Well... @steemit is one of the biggest accounts on here... how does the math pan out?
$3717.82 per 100% vote. x10. $37,000 PER DAY. Granted... that's from an account with an initial investment of SP 70,815,671.44. But damn. We're still talking about a 19% APY. That $75 million invested would net the person who did it, through this system, over $13 million per year. with compounding the initial investment would double in the 5 years a conventional CD would increase it 10-15%.

But I don't have $75 million...

So lets go with something smaller... say $5000. The price of a decent used car, or 50 good nights at the club. 19% APY? $950/year without adjusting for compounding. Still nearly double in 5 years.

That basic formula will hold true for just about any amount, but the larger the initial investment, the faster the compounding will be. That's a lot of math that would require finding the formula for how vote/SP is calculated, adding in the returns after the 7 day hold, etc... and frankly, I have other stuff to do at the moment than all of that for what would really just be additional yield on an already crazy high yield (given the low-moderate risk of STEEM value).

Does anything prevent this from being exploited?

Not that I've seen... in fact there seems to be quite a bit of discussion on if people should/shouldn't upvote themselves. I suppose this is just fuel for that fire. But it's also, perhaps, something the people in charge may want to consider in the development of this project and add protections from. I would say that it IS a form of abuse of the system, given that curation rewards are designed to promote quality content... not just self invest in a money making scheme. Simple removing self-vote could do this... but at the same time, how does that effect demand for STEEM as a whole (and thus, it's price/value)?