Thank you, @ammonite - wishing you the best as well!
And I think we're actually not so much different on the stance against bid-bots. If there would be a way to fix the system which makes bid-bots & promotion-services unnecessary, I'd do it.
And there are actually a few ideas proposed (downvote-pool, higher curation-reward, reduce the strength of bid-bots on trending, etc.). But until there is a solution implemented (I'm a web developer, not c++ developer which means I'm not able to implement it), until then I'll keep Smartsteem.com running. Because then at least, funds generated are going in the right direction (SteemApps.com & co.)
All the best.
Any of these will be disaster for steem economy.
We can build economy around promotion services not fight with them.
Bring enough traffic and people from the outside will compete for them, paying to all steem holders from their ads budgets.
Lets hope 2019 will be a time of change for the better with the things you suggest implemented. My witness vote is incoming.
Thank you - I appreciate it very much!
I can't promise 2019 will be amazing, and I can only speak for myself, but there are a lot of things coming together right now.
I'm fine with bid-bots, and I'd be fine with finding a way of making them unnecessary as well. And I think an aligned incentive approach is best.
There needs to be a revival of the promotion function that burns steem.
We printed to much steem this year, almost in excess of the whole of 2019.
Any solution needs to take burning steem as incentive in consideration.
We did?
It should be around this for end 2019 : 324,458,952 STEEM but it is as of today : 323,192,941 STEEM.
So for next year we get a lower inflation rate but against a higher virtual supply.
But isn’t that just an artifact of the current price against the debt?
Yes it is, and it is staying with us for a long time, compounding like a front-runner, I think it's manageable but for content creators it means, higher inflation than expected. Maybe dilution is the better word.
That's how I feel as well.