In continuation of discussing post promoting services, today I am going to write about the boosters that are not bid bots. The topic is how to use the promoter bots, and a quick analysis on the return.

Shout out to @valorforfreedom as we were discussing the return of these bot votes as well as properties of the minnow booster bot which led naturally to this post.

Specifically, I will focus on MinnowBooster and SmartSteem. These services offer a very simple mechanism for post boosting, much like @qustodian that I briefly mentioned in my last post. Also, as of this posting none of these services leave comments on your posts any longer, which for me is a good thing. I prefer my comments page to be with people that I am interacting with.

It involves sending funds to the bot with steemit.com link to the post you want to boost. Just in case you weren't sure where to do it, I've included a quick image tutorial for doing so. Feel free to skip if you already know.

As is the case with any controversial booster, use this responsibly, or you will lose money when flaggers target cases of flagrant abuse (see: spam posts with only booster votes).

Sending Funds with Memo

From your web wallet, for example this is a link to mine, look for where it lists your STEEM DOLLARS.

To the right of the amount that you have, there is a little triangle you can hit to show you the menu, and "Transfer" is the button you want.

Fill in the amount, and in the memo below, paste in the link you want to promote. In this example I am sending this to @smartmarket to use their post promotion service, which I will discuss in further detail below.

But here's the kicker. It will ask you to login, and there you use your active key. You can find that in the permissions tab. Theoretically you should have already written it down, and if you are currently using your master key to log in (!!!!), ask or look up how to not use it, and only use the posting private key, or in this case the active private key. (Keep your master key safe and use the others instead!!)

This is from the wallet page, there is a "Permissions" section. Logging in with master or active private key will expose the active private key. If you use a password manager, this is a step you may do quite often to copy and paste the key.

Once you have that part down, you'll most often get an error that looks like this:

"Account not found." This seems to be a common funniness with how the transfer to the active credentials works, and similar funniness happens in the internal market. Don't fret, nothing happened. Hit the button again and it will send it.

You will be able to confirm that it sent it in the same page, if you scroll down (possibly a refresh), to the history section.

MinnowBooster

Now that you know how to send funds with a memo, let's discuss the services themselves.

For MinnowBooster, you send the funds to @minnowbooster with the post link in the memo. There are a few things to note. Available votes can be seen in their graph on the website, and scroll down to the chart that should look something like this:

This isn't always accurate, and depends on factors such as RPC node lag which may happen occasionally (you'll see an indicator if this is the case near the top). And it depends on others snatching the high values, since they seem to be quite popular.

Now concerning the second topic, which is the RPC node lag. This may cause delays in upvotes, though it is unclear how long. Historically it seems to have gone to as high as 9 hours, which was actually due to the node itself being down. A comment in this post mentions that it takes approximately 1 hour to catch up on 12 hours of backlog. The 9 hour case was a case where nobody was getting votes.

I've noticed recently where the RPC node lag is 1 hour, and it does indeed still cause delays in votes. If timing is critical for you (e.g. you want all of the value of the upvote, and you do not want it to go to curators), then this matters. You can also see based on recent upvotes in their site when the last vote happened, and when you go to the wallet page of the requesting user, you can see how long ago the funds were sent to MinnowBooster.

From this recent upvote page you can also see the return. In singa's case, you can see that the ratio beteween payment and upvote is ~2.69x. We will be revisiting this ratio shortly in terms of worth.

SmartSteem

SmartSteem seems to be a more recent development, but it has the same properties. However, be sure you know which user to send to. @smartsteem is the bid bot, not the post promotion bot, and works the same way other bid bots work. We will not cover it here.

The post promoter of SmartSteem is @smartmarket.

You can see what is available by looking at their front page, where you will find something like this:

Like minnowbooster, high values seem not to last very long. There are times when the website shows a high number but by the time you send it is no longer available.

Also you'll notice a "Whitelist" value. This is an interesting concept where they rate posts based on a scoring system, and vote sellers can choose to exclusively vote on those on the whitelist. I sent in an application, but the whitelist pending queue is long, so who knows how long that will take. It does appear that often there are more votes available for whitelisted folks.

One thing to note for this service is that they guarantee returns post curation. Meaning that the service computes what portion of the reward would go to the service, and then they subtract that amount from your SBD fee.

It's not clear just what the return is though. We'll do some sample computations.

You can see the value of all your votes given via smartsteem if you log into SmartSteem and go to your profile. You'll see something like this:

I paid 3 SBD for this one, so upvote is ~2.2x here.

Percent Rewards Profitability

Here's a general question. What is the upvote value that would allow users to break even in terms of market values?

Let's say the market price of STEEM is P, and the market price of SBD is Q.

Let's say the amount of SBD we pay is J. Let the given vote value be R. And for argument's sake let's assume post 30 minute vote.

3/8 * R goes into your pocket as SBD, and 3/8 * R is converted to STEEM POWER at a rate reciprocal to the STEEM market value (price feed), so you'd get 3/8 * R/P amount of STEEM POWER.

Did you make a profit, market-value wise? To convert STEEM to SBD at market rates, you multiply by P/Q.

The portion going to STEEM POWER is thus worth 3/8 * R/Q amount of SBD. So, your SBD profit is

3/8 * R * (1 + 1/Q) - J

and you would be making a profit when the upvote ratio is

R/J > 8/3 * 1 / (1 + 1/Q)

So at an SBD price of 6 USD, your upvote ratio would have to be

R/J > 8/3 * (1 / (1 + 1/6)) ~ 2.29

and that is just to break even.

At the peg price of 1 USD, your upvote ratio would have to be R/J > 1.33.

Percent Rewards Profitability, Vote at 0 Minutes

Real quickly, let's analyze if the vote happens immediately, and so all of the vote value goes to you. (Greedy, eh!)

1/2 * R goes into your pocket as SBD, and you get 1/2 * R/P amount of STEEM POWER.

The portion going to STEEM POWER is worth 1/2 * R/Q amount of SBD. So, the SBD profit is

1/2 * R * (1 + 1/Q) - J

and you will have made a profit if

R/J > 2  / (1 + 1/Q)

So at an SBD price of 6 USD, your upvote ratiowould have to be

R/J > 2 / (1 + 1/6) ~ 1.72

and at the peg price of 1 USD, your upvote ratio would have to be R/J > 1.

Minnowbooster Example

From earlier, the minnowbooster example had a user pay 1.99 SBD for a 5.36 upvote. Using 6 USD SBD price, and assuming curation is in effect, the profit is

 3/8 * 5.36 * (1 + 1/6) - 1.99 ~ 0.355

which is about an 17.8% return on initial investment.
Your own mileage may vary.

Smartsteem Example

For the smartsteem example, I paid 3 SBD for a 6.6 upvote. Using 6 USD SBD price and assuming curation is in effect, the profit in this case is

3/8 * 6.6 * (1 + 1/6) - 3 ~  -0.1125

or a loss of 3.75%. Your own mileage may vary.

Summary

Hopefully you now have a good idea of the resources available to you if you are considering purchasing votes from MinnowBooster or SmartSteem.

If you want to get an idea of the threshold for which you will be losing in terms of market values, the formula if J is the initial payment, R is the upvote value, S is the fraction of the reward that goes to you (and not curators), and Q is the USD price of SBD:

S/2 * R * (1 + 1/Q) -  J

is the profit, and this profit is positive when

(R/J) > 2/S * 1 / (1 + 1/Q)

For concreteness, two regimes, with Q = 6 USD price of SBD:

• Post 30 minute vote: S = 0.75, and so R/J >2.29 gives profit.
• Immediate vote: S = 1, and so R/J > 1.72 gives profit.

Pay attention to how the two services behave in terms of their return, and you can analyze for yourself if you are losing money or not. For Minnowbooster you can see that with "Latest Upvotes" section. I am not aware of where you can find this for SmartSteem. In theory they are already taking this information into account, though I'm not able to find this information listed.

This information of course applies to any other post promoter and bid bot, in terms of the profitability computation.

On a final note, I will say this: to me the SBD is worth 1 USD, so all of this is just a steal!

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