You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Vote selling hasn't been affected by the fall of minnowbooster
So, what you're saying is that bots can interact with the blockchain via other interfaces, such as busy.org, MSPSteemit.com, etc...
Are you certain this isn't preventable? While Stinc allows unregulated interaction with the blockchain, AFAIK, is this necessarily the only policy?
Couldn't Stinc require an interface to be accepted?
None of us can differentiate between a vote from a bot, or a vote from a person - that's my problem with bots. They're not people, and shouldn't be impacting votes on social media IMHO.
But bots can't use 2fa, or solve captchas, and if most bots interact with the blockchain via Steemit, then most bots can be controlled via Steemit.
Thanks for pointing out the additional potential attack vectors bots present!
What I am saying is that you do not need a web interface to interact with the blockchain (if you know what you are doing). Steemit Inc does not own the blockchain so they cannot prevent anyone to interact with the blockchain (if they did then the platform would not be censorship resistant).
Bots do not use steemit or busy or chainbb or any other public app to interact with the blockchain (I think you misunderstand how bots work). I am not a programmer but even I can figure out how to use the code to build my own bot or interface (it's not going to be pretty but I think I can make it work).
Furthemore bots are not bad in and of themelves, they are just tools that can be used for good or bad. Take @cheeta for example. That is a bot that searches for content that is likely to be plagiarized.
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