Today's topic is about bidding bots. What's fascinating about them is that they allow a crowd to decide the multiplier for the vote that the crowd receives. These bots are voting accounts that vote every time their voting power reaches 100% (in most cases, some go to 50%, etc), and the votes are allocated to bidders that bid during this recovery time, in proportion to the bid amount.

The main purpose is to boost a post's visibility soon after a post is published in the hopes of sending to hot or trending sections. The secondary purpose is simply to turn a profit, or to tip other posts when your voting power is exhausted. We know what most people use it for, now myself included on this list.

In any case, I wanted to list out a few observations I had concerning the bid bots now that I have played a bit with them.

Bid Bot Multiplier

Here's the deal. If the vote value is V, and the total bids total to J bids (in SBD), then the multiplier that everyone in the pool will receive is V/J.

It's that simple. Bot operators may cap what J is allowed to be to determine a “minimum multiplier” for the service, and refund any bids taking the amount over that cap. Though I do not see these caps publicized anywhere. Also, if that minimum multiplier is too low, at a time of high demand for votes, users may end up at a loss relative to the market.

The appeal is clear: if you don't have a friendly whale to vote you, you can choose to spend a little to get the same effect.

When to Bid

Given the math behind the bot, the key is to use the bot when it isn't busy, and such times you would be able to use larger bids to get a much higher multiplier compared to less busy times. I won’t have guidance here, but there is some inklings from Google search, like this post from 4 months ago that did some analysis.

It should be interesting to see what the total historical bids received in SBD / upvote size was in terms of the multiplier. That gives an idea of at what time the multiplier is largest for a given bot. I do not have this data though. Seems like a great feature to add for the Steem Bot Tracker of @yababpmatt !

Bid Amounts

As for the question, “How much should I throw as a bid?” The answer is, if it’s not busy, feel free to put as much as you need, though the usual caveats apply (Others may disagree with what you have given yourself).

And if you put the minimum bid allowable, you’ll get the biggest bang for your buck. Best case, you get the entire 100% vote for yourself for a pittance (ha! not likely). Worst case, too many bidders bid, the bids fill up and you get the minimum multiplier set by the bot, which hopefully should be set to something reasonable. And no other bid amount would have changed that multiplier.

However, there is one other consideration: timing the vote so that it hits as early as possible after your post is published. This means more of the vote will go to the author, due to the reverse auction aspect of curation. If you are able to get a vote at 0 minutes, you get the entirety of that vote’s value. If you get a vote at 15 minutes, you get 87.5% of the value, and so on. This is a point that I do not have confirmation on other than a few other posts on the subject. I’ve took a preliminary glance at code and was not able to find the relevant parts. Will make a further update about this if I find where it is, or some other post that confirms this behavior.

Did I make money?

See this post about the profit calculation, given curation percentage, the vote value, and the input. The bot tracker also shows this computation in various forms which is useful as well. To compare the computations done, set everything to be in terms of SBD.

Summary

The multiplier on the upvotes that go to bidders is simply the total upvote value divided by the sum of bids in SBD amount.

Studying how busy the bots are is the secret to getting the largest vote multiplier on your bids.

Everyone should be using Steem Bot Tracker to track current bids, and bids in the past round, as well as the profit computation.

A few suggestions that might augment the bot tracker:

1. If it's possible to determine what the minimum multiplier is (when bid bots start to reject / refund bids).
2. Show breakdown of historical multipliers by time.

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