Do ALL BIDBOTS Actually Make You LOSE Money? Why Are 50/50 Payouts Not Paid In 50% SBD/50% SBD Worth Of STEEM?
Say What?
Can anyone help me figure out why the post payout, 75 percent of approx 99 STU only paid out approx 37.5 SBD and 9.5 SP? I had put over 46 SBD into the post, and did not lose any of the bids. So how did I end up losing money?
To Get Mass Adoption, You Have To Make It Clearer
Why is half of the STU post award amount, divided by the dollar price of Steem Power? With 75 percent of a 100 dollar STU, wouldn't that be 75/2= half SBD and half Steem Power? That would equal 37.5 SBD and 37.5 SBD worth of Steem, so shouldn't it be 37.5 times the price of SBD, which currently is about 3.5 dollars? 131.25 worth of SBD, divided by the price of Steem (about 4 USD)? That comes out to 131.25/4 USD = 32 Steem?
SBD is almost the same price as Steem, so instead of 37.5 SBD and 9.5 Steem, shouldn't it have been 37.5 SBD and 32 in Steem power? It seems like I'm losing money, not gaining? Is this right?
In Order To Win, You Have To Lose?
I spent over 46 SBD, valued at about $161, to get back $166. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. (and the few dollars profit would be from the non bot votes)
It seems like for 75 percent of 100, 75 STU you should get 37.5 SBD and 37.5 SBD worth of Steem power, not 37.5 divided by Steem power price?
If this is the case, then what is the purpose of the Bid Bots? How is this helping anyone besides the bot makers and bot investors?
Was It Always This Way?
The posts are listed in STU, not dollars, so it should have been 75 percent of 99 SBD. I'm confused. It seems like someone forgot to update the system when the SBD's value became more than a dollar?
100 percent steem payout is a scam? Even worse, before this I had selected 100 percent Steem Payout, until a kind fellow Steemian, @cfs.leaks, let me know that is basically throwing money away. Wow, it is heartbreaking to think about how much I lost there. I am guessing probably several hundred (all of which was money I invested).
Why not just label the choices for payout more accurately and honestly, such as: decline payout, 100 percent full payout (currently the 50/50 option), or decline half of your payout (currently the 100 percent steem power option)?
Apparently this is caused by a "broken peg". What in the heck is a broken peg, why is it broken, who broke it, and why cant it be fixed?? Why do we have to demand that it be fixed, in the first place? Where is the ethics in that?
Why Should The Rise/Success Of SBD Mean Loss/Failure For Steemians?
Has anyone asked this question before? I would like to know what whales and bot owners and Steem Inc have to say about this? It really seems as though the "nodes" or whatever were not updated with the correct input information and data once the SBD rose over a dollar. They made it no secret since it is everywhere that the SBD was meant to be closely tied to the dollar. Well, clearly it is not, so why then was the payout data not corrected to reflect the amount of SBD value?
Then What Is The Point?
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS REPORT, PLEASE LIKE, SUBSCRIBE AND RE-STEEM! THANKS!
Previous Related Posts:
Thanks for giving me the heads-up on this post @miss-j; it makes for very interesting reading - though it leaves me with more questions than answers.
Given the structure if the payouts, if what you say is correct, then the broken peg is indeed to of distinct benefit to bot-owners. But given that it essentially makes it harder to earn SP from post payouts, it's also beneficial to those who already hold a lot of SP, because it makes sure the ability of later adopters to amass SP is reduced.
Of course, with recent comments by @ned (I'm too tired to find the link right now, but if you can't track it down in the next 12 hours I'll find it for you), indicate that he might not be entirely happy how the whole stake-weighted voting thing. That's interesting because any hint of a move towards one account = one vote could mean all that SP that those whales are and bots are hoarding is suddenly worth a lot less. This is all speculative, but maybe there are interesting changes on the way.
I pointed this out a couple months ago when I first came here, and I suspect it has been left this way on purpose. I experimented briefly with the bots, losing money based on this calculation without eyes still seeing my work. The true beneficiaries of the bots are really the bot owners and their investors. Which is why larger stakeholders find it more profitable to invest in bots than their own accounts. I am guessing this was left this way to keep the larger stakeholders happy, banking on most not understanding the math.
the plot thickens... I tried to go back and analyze some older posts, but the information regarding transfer amounts is blank now, in the steemworld app, anyways.
Anything over a week or two old the data is removed. wonder why that is? I suppose there should still be the data in the wallet activity, but it will just be a bit more tedious to go back and collect the info that way.
Im going to try and see what the differences are using steem vs SBD for bids...
Everyone complaining about the bots, I bet even most of them dont realize that the supposed votes we are bidding on and buying, isnt actually profitting us either. Its kinda like the promoted tab, except instead of throwing the money away and burning it, they renamed a tab trending, and the profit goes to the bots.
... but the votes we thought we bought a portion of, even knowing some would go to curators and bot curators, we didnt buy at all! We just pay for the priveledge of pretending like we bought a portion of the vote... its kinda like telling a whale, hey, Ill give you 5o dollars if you upvote me 50 dollars. lol or worse, paying 50 for a 45 dollar vote, and still not get into the trending tab!
I guess it does guarantee one thing though, the reputation number goes up.... however the whale votes are basically removed from the steemit equation, as they are getting the profit, along with steemit when the payout conversion divides half the payout STU into steem.
Im having a hard time understanding what the rational of any of this is....
Yes, and where it is set to make the poor poorer and the rich richer is they (bot owners) get it all in SBD, undiluted with the heavy cut taking place in SP. Then they get gravy in curation rewards, lol. This is why it is so profitable for many to delegate their SP to the bots. I saw some breakdowns yesterday showing an average of 36% return on investing in some of the bots. Then they wonder why curation from high SP accounts keeps going down.
It is still not popular yet, but there is a new tag being used called nobidbot. I am hopeful it takes as it offers a way for us to bypass the Hot and Trending feeds to look for quality work not there just due to large votes purchased.
Also, the fact that any votes under .02 doesn't pay out is an important detail i didnt know about... until recently. :/ i would have waited to get back up to 100 percent voting power much sooner, if i had known that. It took me well over a month to finally get to 100 percent.
Yeah, about a month ago I was running as low as 45% and had to step away for a few days.
check this out
https://steemit.com/steemit/@kafkanarchy84/smts-oracles-and-account-based-voting-ned-s-asia-tour-easter-egg
My initial feeling on this is that it will exacerbate the already existing issues. It will create a secondary group that will be in charge of communities for the common user to contend with on top of the already existing whale votes. This will result in those who are in the in group to get the highest ratings within those communities, those who do not do the necessary ass kissing will likely more often than not be found of lesser quality or to have no quality.
I am going to write up a piece on all of this soon. Thanks for calling my attention to the video.
https://steemit.com/community/@dustsweeper/ann-introducing-dustsweeper-a-new-service-to-turn-dust-into-profit
That's an excellent idea! Maybe ill try that too. If its the way it seems to be, education is the answer. I guarantee most people using the bots, or even those not using, dont realize the full scope of this.
The flagging wars also eat up votes, so those are off the table. If i wanted to be conspiratorial, i might suggest haijen is a plant to make people think bidding on the bots are profitable. I won't go that far yet, but its interesting to me why he is doing it at all, or if he is doing it for far less profit than it looks like.
The circle jerk is by far the most profitable... besides being a bot investor or a bid bot.
I really wish they would make communities, as that would solve aot of issues i think, organize the clutter, so to speak.
I wish i knew what it was like before the bidbots. Was it almost impossible then for a plankton or minnows to get a whale vote, too?
and the payouts have got to be fixed... i could convert money straight to steem, or invest in my own post and lose a large portion of it.
so basically ... what it comes down to is, by investing my own money using the bid bots, I am paying steemit for the privilege of posting here, and not the other way around.
"it leaves me with more questions than answers"
me too! lol I'm about to sleep but yes, I'd be interested to see what @ned has to say about these things and more importantly what kinds of changes will be implemented on the next fork. I'll search for it, see if I can find it.
I kept thinking this has to be wrong, maybe I am just not adding it up correctly? i have another bigger payout coming in a day or so, so we will see how that one turns out.
This also makes me curious about the Haijen issue, because he is doing what he is doing for a reason, so he has to be gaining money, right? Except instead of one post a day he does a dozen and bets three times as much on each post. To what end though?
Maybe his payout is different due to his SP? I've yet to analyze his wallet and those kinds of things, maybe one of these days when I am bored enough I will, just to try and compare and see what the heck is going on. I'd be curious to see if there is any difference between the amount he transfers to the bidbots, and the amount the bid bot itself returns at payout.
I was shocked a bit, but remain hopeful. I am going to fiddle around a bit more, because that's the way I learn best, through trial and error and then analyzing things, but I am not that technical at all so alot of this is a learning curve as well.
the 100 percent steem payout thing is the most disturbing to me. I cannot believe how much I wasted that way. Why not just label the choices for payout more accurately and honestly, such as:
decline payout, 100 percent full payout (currently the 50/50 option), or decline half of your payout (currently the 100 percent steem power option)
:)
this is interesting : https://steemit.com/steemit/@kafkanarchy84/smts-oracles-and-account-based-voting-ned-s-asia-tour-easter-egg
It certainly is! Communities decide how rewards are allocated within them - great. But who decides who gets to be the 'oracles' of the communities, and by what mechanism? Because if it's stake-weighted voting, we'll just end up with whales in charge of everything, again. And then who decides how much of the reward pool a community gates to allocate (and how do they decide it)? Does every community need a whale to bankroll it? Or do we just run an SMT-enabled ico, and create our own reward pool? (thereby pumping more money into steem in the process - oh yeah, just in case you missed it, that's one of the main functions of SMTs - to drive money into steem).
hmmmm.
looks like i will have to boost this post too, to get any chance whatsoever a whale or botowner or a witness will see it. It is a Stack of Fuck Shit, on top of itself, brother... 
Bid bots are a free market. Ned and Steemit inc did not set them up.
When the price of SBD rose and far exceded $1 the bid bots were somewhat proffitable because Steem was low. The bid bots pay lease fees and the lease fees(unless the bid bot owns all its own SP) went up and up as the SBD situation made it more profitable to the people buying bids.
Anyway.... If they arent profitable right now then people shouldnt use them. They have been unprofitable in the past. People still use them because of ignorance and greed.
The best formula to succeed on Steemit is to Post top quality Posts AND to network and meet people. If you do this you will get occasional big votes from Whales organically. But it takes faith, commitment and willingness to struggle through $2 post payouts.
I have used upvote bots and bid bots as experiments and just to see in the past. I will not use bid bots anymore because there is the risk of getting less than u expect.
The only small possible value in upvote bots is if u use a lot (=$100) and it gets you visibility that gets you more followers and eventually more payout per post and eventually notice by whales. But also some whales will refuse to upvote or follow people heavily using bid bots. So my counsel is the same as I said above: put up top quality posts, socialize and tough it out.
Hope this helps!
Peace
What about the payouts in general? Shouldn't the calculations Have changed when the sbd rose above a dollar? During payout for all posts, half is multiplied times steem dollar value, and the other half is divided by price of steem power. That would only make sense if the value of sbd was a dollar.
I also wonder why it was expected to be tied to the dollar value, and how they thought they could keep the value (pegged) at a dollar? When it became 3 to four times the value, hence the "broken peg", shouldn't the "fix" be as easy as multiplying the stu half by the current market value of sbd, then convert that amount to steem? The way it is now, we are being financially punished for the success and rise of the steem backed dollar.
It also makes it a snails pace to build up steem power through posting.
Steem vs SBD bidding experiment.
okay, so I just bid a little over 15.813 steem, and got 41.39 STU. so far, it would seem like at a small 8 dollar profit. 42.11 x .75 = 31.5825
then 31.5825/2 = 15.79125 SBD (X 3.06) (48.32 USD)
then 15.79125/3.52 = 4.486 SP (15.79 USD)
64.11 USD
unless it pays out in Steem somehow, rather than SBD.however, the post's total values for everyone seem to gradually reduce every day, until the payout, 7 days later, so any of the small profit it does have now, will likely get reduced to almost zero by the time comes to pay it out.
I will try to compare with a SBD bid tomorrow and see it side by side. We can analyze what happens to them both through the week.
how does that make sense?
http://steem.supply/rewards
I guess this answered your question?
sort of. not the why. :)