First of all, I am glad my previous Steem Talk topic managed to grab some attention. Be it effective or not, as long someone are inspires, I'd be glad to continue discussion. Today, I am going to talk about vote buying and vote bidding from bidbots.

# Plot

There are two types of vote buying. These are vote buying and vote bidding. We will exclude those exclusive member club type of subscription base trading, we will be focusing on plain transaction base. Money in, money out. No money, no talk. One may ask, why buy votes when we can earn upvotes from human? That is a good question, but like in all financial market, crypto finance is as sophisticated as fiat finance(may be more complex than fiat). Buying votes (generally also refer to bidding for a portion of vote) has many many agenda behind this action. It could be for the sake of promoting for trending. It could be purely for profit. It could be a little bit of both. It could be another way of powering up.

# Vote buying

There are vendors who allow vote buying to assist user to "make up" their post payout, so the post can hit a higher rank on the trending page. Some of them are my long time favorite, for example smartsteem.com minnowbooster.net and [@tipu](https://steemit.com/@tipu) . Vote buying are usually limiting the profitability to ensure investors(delegators) gets back what they've invested. Their payout generally ranged between 101% and 125% AFTER curation. Which means, if you send in 2SBD for vote buying, you'll probably get an upvote of $2.80. After removing curation reward(0.70), the potential payout should be $2.10. During the one week time of waiting, market could gain strength and we're in great deal of trouble, because whatever value shows on the author rewards, half of them has to be paid in SP. And SP is 1:1 steem value. Generally, we're still safe in vote buying, and it seldom happened to have price hike of more then 50% and last for 3.5 days. Vote buying can be very convenient because not required to wait for VP recovery or they're open for buying only after they're recovered from previous voting round. And if the system weren't able to fully upvote us, they will refund the balance. I personally use this type of vote buying  technique to power up my other accounts which has less audience.

# Bid for vote

This is rather interesting way of gambling for an UPVOTE. Some of these bid bot can vote more than 100$ in one full upvote. As at now, vast majority of bid bots are listed in steembottracker.com which user can track the current standing of that bidding round. Let's make an example of 100% voting pool, if there are 4 users, individually sent in 2,4,6and 8SBD to a total amount of 20SBD. That does not mean the bot will let the users to enjoy rest of the voting power. There is a limit cap to profitability. If the cap is 25%, which means the bid bot will distribute 33.3% of vote value amongst these 4 person according to their bid value.

- 2SBD gets 3.33% vote
- 4SBD gets 6.66% vote
- 6SBD gets 9.99% vote
- 8SBD gets 13.32% vote 

And therefore guys, don't get overly excited when you see heavy ROI before the bidding round time is up.  There is no doubt, it is more profitable compare to vote buying IF there is no other buyer. However, you wouldn't know which big shark is hiding behind their keyboard, towards the final moment, they throw in a 50SBD bid, and there goes our profitability. What worst is, if more than one of these assholes came does the same thing, the profitability go burst. 20SBD + 50SBD + 50SBD. Total pool became 120SBD. The voting round will be divided by 100%. Vote distribution go as below.

- 20SBD gets only 16.66% vote
- 50SBD gets only 41.66% vote each

How is this profitable? However, it's all about luck. Bidding vote, meaning you have a chance to expose your bid to others. Steembottracker has a convenient for other people to take advantage of curation trail reward. Other users may see you bid for a huge upvote, they can front run the bot. This way, you may actually earn a little bit extra upvote from other users.

# Summary

Whichever way we choose to buy or bid for vote, there is always risks involved. I don't buy vote unless necessarily. And I can't remember when was the last time I bid for vote, after I got beat up badly during sudden spike in SBD value when I throw in 20 seems. There's just way more risk than hodling rock hard crypto in cryptoland.

![Screenshot_2019-04-11-11-43-17-170_com.android.chrome.png](https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/Qmb3kqkGP5ci4xHr5N6iuCSvgATYhCPFd29vsJEtTkWT8m)