There
is a lot of discussion lately about vote gaming systems including whale vote bots. It has long been a topic of discussion in fact but the success of SteemSports in particular has got writers most especially crying foul.
Well, for good reason.
But while sitting waiting for the inloophuis to open I thought of a solution. It is a general solution for bots that vote with the main account of a user, it would not stop autonomous bot accounts that the user does not manually view, but it would stop Streemian and Steemtrail working if it was implemented also.
It requires a new transaction on the blockchain for registering a user account session has been opened, and no other sessions can be opened for a period of time, say half an hour. It would not need identify the IP address or even note which witness is currently permitted to relay transactions, though it would seed the transaction to the next witness in the block schedule.
The next thing would be that every timeout period the session must be reregistered or transactions are not allowed to be posted to the blockchain.
By doing this to the RPC protocol, you would end automated voting and this is the key reason the vote games are so successful. It would not entirely end it because a person could dedicate an account to voting on them and only use another account to manually create transactions.
Regarding autonomous accounts the network could use a web service to run a captcha on the user once every few days and these accounts would be thus made much harder to operate because they would have to provide a web browser interface for the captcha. This frequency would not be obtrusive. It probably could be used to make the user log in and times it out after, say, once a day.
Afterthought
I suspect that this solution would ruffle some feathers also but really, it is not difficult to add autovoting systems to a user interface. But it would still greatly limit nonhuman activity.
Update
It again raises the question I have whether it would benefit Steem if whales could get a boost in interest without voting power, then minnow votes would affect payouts more.
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!
