i was thinking about the very subject of abuse this morning and recalled reading the white paper.

While it is impossible to stop abuse, you cannot ignore it, and you also cannot make an environment that is easy for scammers to take advantage of. That is simply what happens when you create a money tree and combine it with unlimited ROI bots.

The only way to combat this loss is to put a stop to the abuse by making it too expensive to abuse. For example, in order to forge US dollars, you would need to make it very expensive to make forged money. Continuously change the dies and inks so the forgers have to keep working to keep up with technology.

We cannot do that here, but we need to find ways to replicate the difficulty. One way is to making vote bots have a negative ROI by making them pay their share of access to steem nodes. This would drive down activity on the blockchain and reduce cost all around.

The byproduct of this will either be the downfall of the blockchain, or a renaissance because all of the SP holders now have to find new ways to make profit from their locked in SP.