"Bandwidth limit exceeded. Please wait to transact or power up STEEM"

Yesterday it happened to me as well. Whenever I tried to respond to a comment or make a posting I received a red warning message: “bandwidth limit exceeded. Please wait to transact or power up STEEM”.

First, I was wondering what has happened. How could my bandwidth be exceeded. I haven't posted anything for at least a day. Then I started searching for the issue and came across a number of postings by people who had experienced the same problem at some moment in the past. Among them

@greenman81: Getting message "Bandwidth limit exceeded. Please wait to transact or power up"?

@rainchen: Bandwidth limit exceeded. Please wait to transact or power up ... ?

@shankar: Bandwidth limit exceeded. Please wait wait to transact or power up steem. What does it mean?

@alphacore: "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" - The Silent Killer

@sosky: "Bandwidth limit exceeded. Please wait to transact or power up".

@rycharde: Why Are So Many Users Hitting Their Bandwidth Limit? Solved It! What You Can Do.

Others had already discussed the problem on Reddit as well.

I went to https://steemd.com/@username and figured out my bandwidth was at -300% (minus 300!).

The authors mentioned above and also other community members had shared their experience through comments suggesting different solutions. Among them:

1. Waiting until bandwidth comes back.
2. Power up Steem from your account or buy Steem and then power it up.

Regarding number 1: yes, it works. You can just wait until your bandwidth comes back and you can observe it at https://steemd.com/@username. It took me a couple of hours and during this waiting period I observed my bandwidth increasing but also crashing down again from one moment to the other.

Regarding number 2: some users have obviously made positive experience with that. I did not try it out. In fact, I had planned to buy Steem and power it up to Steem Power this week. When I figured out how easily a Steemit account can be damaged (bandwidth issue) without a reason I decided not to buy any Steem at all. I am sceptical about systems that punish users the way it is happening here.

What are the reasons behind this bandwidth issue?

Some suggest it is just a glitch or a bug.

Others argue that wealthy/powerful users (aka whales) can power down others at will due to their strong voting power. (Whoever owns a lot can punish others with less power or wealth at free will. A horrible scenario.)

I tried to find out possible reasons for my account losing all bandwidth from one day to the other and even from one minute to the other without any active interference from my side. I had not commented on any polemic issues in the past that could have stirred up anger of some wealthy folks (my account is two weeks old). I did not see any objective reason for what had happened to my account. And checking my account on steemd.com I understood that I was not downvoted at any moment.

Looking through my previous postings I came across one comment from a user who obviously got into trouble. This user had left a comment on my posting a few days before. A comment that did not make too much sense to me (as if he had not understood or looked at the posting at all) but that was not enough of a reason for me to ignore his comment so I voted it up and replied with a short thank you. At that moment there was nothing strange happening, the user was fairly new on Steemit and had a reputation of 25 on that day.

Searching for answers to the problem I had with losing my bandwidth I realized that exactly that comment on my previous posting was now hidden behind a message: “Comments were hidden due to low ratings”. I clicked on the “Show” button and the comments appeared (partly). After that I clicked on the “Reveal” button and that specific user comment appeared as well. I realized his reputation had gone down from 25 to -1 (in about two days). Entering his profile I figured out he had joined Steemit two weeks before and had already made 5600 postings. I saw many resteems and no individual postings. Also, I realized he was posting the exact same comments under various postings. Obviously a spammer. Probably a bot.

Checking out the profile at https://steemd.com I understood he was now systematically downvoted by two specific users. Judging from their own profiles they could be considered self-appointed spam hunters.

While I was clicking on that downvoted comment and on the bot's profile page I observed also my own account on https://steemd.com. And I realized that my bandwidth went down to -300% again while I was clicking through comments and profiles.

Conclusion

What I did was observing an issue that obviously hits quite a lot of users on Steemit. I observed decreasing bandwidth at the moment I was interacting with a profile that was downvoted before. This however is no proof of any correlation. It remains an observation.

And it left me with a number of open questions:

Is there any correlation between users clicking on downvoted content or profiles (especially upvoting or revealing it) and their own bandwidth level? Are users being punished by interacting with such content or profiles?

Are wealthy and powerful users (who maybe even auto-declare themselves to be security guards) able to punish any user at free will including those that are not spamming at all? Here actually the answer is quite obviously: yes, they can. It is the shitstorm of the few.

How is Steemit expecting to become a serious users-driven community if these issues persist?

Maybe there is no correlation between user behaviour and low bandwidth level and maybe it is indeed a mathematical issue as suggested by @rycharde (see his posting above). Whatever it is, it remains a serious quality issue for the Steemit network. Currently, my bandwidth has dropped to -800%. If you can read this posting it means it came up again to above zero. After several hours of waiting.