RE: Should I use my VOTE as PAYMENT for GAMBLING - or MY OWN Money?
This is nice, but there is a flaw in your assumption.
All rewards end up on the market eventually. It doesn't really matter if this is from gambling or not. The amount given out each day is fixed and all voting does is determine who gets what amount each day. If you benefit directly by your own vote there is nothing ethically wrong with this in my book.
As for whale making. @wang became a huge whale by providing a bot that welcomed new users. He got tons of upvotes from the noobs and the regular users alike. There is nothing wrong with whale making by upvotes.
What needs to happen is the voting thing needs to be formalized for gambling so it's more accessible. They could do this by simply launching an app and asking for the user's voting key.
Agree with your sentiment about the distribution of rewards, especially in this case where it isn't just a matter of 'bets' but a novel structure along with sports content and significant effort being put into building a business in the ecosystem. As a small correction, wang became a moderate whale from early mining and then a larger whale mostly from curation rewards and I believe relatively little from the welcome comment posts.
Thanks for the clarification. i just remember people flipping out because he was the first bot made whale. The bot was upvoting a handful of people repeatedly and at the time his vote was worth something like $500 USD each.
We are doing exactly that: see the preview at https://bitsports.io
Correction: We have rebranded into https://steemsports.com