RE: Vote selling hasn't been affected by the fall of minnowbooster
It's undoubtedly true that I misunderstand how bots work.
What I see bots doing, however, indicates to me that the harm (IMHO) is dependent on interfacing with the community, particularly on Steemit, the only place I perceive them.
It is this interaction between bots and people, in particular the ability of bots to be employed to impact the choices made by the community as to content quality - votebots - that I am attempting to address.
Since your point, that the bots themselves need not interact with people on Steemit directly, and merely direct their voting as per interactions between people on Steemit mandate, establishes that neither 2FA nor captchas have potential to preclude bot votes, I deeply appreciate your explanation.
Nothing pleases me more than finding out I am wasting my time, because that enables me to change how I proceed.
Thanks!
The first post that I made on steemit (more than a year ago) was a complaint about voting bots. As I learned more about the platform and blockchains in general I realized that bots can't be stopped.
Over time I realized that the Steem blockchain is much more than steemit or the social media applications that are being built around it. A good example is utopian.io which is a platform that uses steem to reward contributions to open source projects.
With the upcoming launch of the Smart Media Tokens protocol a whole new avenue will open up for anyone bold and creative enough to build new applications on top of the Steem blockchain.
There is an old post from @dantheman that sheds some light as to what can be done with this technology (it opened my eyes...especially the part where it mentions that we don't need permission from steemit.inc):
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/how-anyone-can-build-custom-apps-on-steem-right-now