RE: Changing the Code to Incentivize Curation
This could be bypassed by selling votes through a website, as you can already do. You can deposit funds to Minnowbooster and then upvote posts directly through their website. Additionally, any code to detect a post link could be bypassed trivially, and of course people would do that. It would be in the best interests of the buyer and the seller.
You could also exploit this to reduce the effect of a user's vote. For example, let's say that you don't like UserA, but UserB does. Since you dislike UserA, you downvote their posts. UserB always counters your downvotes with upvotes. You could send 0.001 SBD to UserB right after flagging UserA's post, and since UserB's vote would be counted as a promotion upvote, you effectively silenced UserA for just 1/10th of a cent, for reward calculation purposes.
So paying outside of the Steem blockchain to upvote posts, yes that would bypass it. Depositing funds to a site like monnowbooster still is a transaction on the Steem blockchain I think. But that would involve extra steps that most users wouldn't do, still stopping the majority of vote buyers.
Using an encoded URL would also be a workaround, that is a problem. I'll have to think about that heh.
If you only remove the rewards for a vote from a bought vote, then it doesn't matter if someone pays 0.01 or 1, or 10. The only to lose is the vote buyer who lost money buying a vote for someone to get promoted. The author won't lose money if it's only 100% of the purchased votes that get re-allocated to the reward pool.
Thanks for the feedback.
Well depositing funds to minnowbooster is a transaction on Steem blockchain, but then you can purchase votes from Minnowbooster without visible transactions. It can be even done months after the deposit.
Also, when you use Minnowbooster, you earn rewards which are automatically othe minnowbooster "deposit". This way you can sell votes to earn rewards and then buy votes for yourself without any blockchain transaction between you and minnowbooster. Even the votes typically come from vote-selling accounts.
How are they note visible? You send to a crypto address? And they pay you via a blockchain address? But a bidbot account is still voting on your post so it can be seen...
If you send money from your account to Minnowbooster it's visible, of course, or if you withdraw money from there. But otherwise you can use their webpage to purchase the votes: you just enter the post url on Minnowbooster page, so you don't need to give the post url in a blockchain transaction.
Also back in the days when Randowhale was the only vote selling bot, people used to buy more votes for friends and great posts, if they were unable to give high votes themselves and wanted the post to get a good payout. So I'm assuming people could still use purchased votes to support friends, as it's easier to spend some SBD to buy a vote for a friend than get enough SP to give it a big vote.
But on the third point, Minnowbooster is also using the "vote seller" accounts. If I would purchase a vote from minnowbooster, it might not be minnowbooster account who upvotes me. Instead they're using bunch of accounts who have given permission to sell votes to upvote them.
Like I'm currently having the vote selling on for MB whitelisted users. If I'm having more than 90% VP (which never happens when I'm active), my votes can be used for vote selling. So this would work only on times when I'm completely inactive for few days, when I'm manually upvoting I'm usually around 60-80% on VP.
Dang it! :P Implementing the change would force them all to adopt that model I suppose and it couldn't be traced...