The sale of Steemit accounts is a lucrative business. In my search for a Steemit bot I stumbled on a forum where the sale of accounts is booming.
Multiple accounts
A hot topic here on Steemit, a lot of Steemians have more than one account setup. There are various reasons why an alternative account may come in handy (not judging by any means). Steemit's current verification system seems incapable of preventing people making more than one account. There are even Steemians with hundreds and even more than a thousand accounts active.
The Black Market
In my search on Google for a python script for a bot I stumbled on the https://bitcointalk.org/ forums. My search for a bot had let me to the following post:
Now I am kind of new to Steemit but I never knew that you could buy accounts or in this case an army of bots that could net you $40-50 dollars a day.
I searched the forum for more mentions of Steemit and found more people selling accounts for money/BTC.
Against the rules?
So is it against the rules? I can not find anything prohibiting multiple accounts and a lot of well known Steemians have multiple accounts.
There is also nothing against selling your account (at least not that I could find) in the TOS (here).
So selling an army of bots that can net you 40 bucks a day does not seem to be against the rules.
Social Control
So it is up to the community to enforce the law (I love this about Steemit).
The community as a whole decides which behavior is acceptable and what is not. This is probably the reason why the sale of accounts is on forums like blackhatworld.com and bitcointalk.org and not on Steemit. These posts would probably get flagged into the ground.
Devil's Advocate
So hypothetically speaking what would happen if I decided to buy one of the bot armies? Officially I would not be breaking any "Steemit" laws (I probably wouldn't make much friends either). Would I get flagged, banned, my account(s) disabled or ostracized by the community?
My guess is none of the above. The seller of the bot armies (he has 4) has been making multiple accounts for a long time probably and has been getting away with it (as far as I know).
My take on the matter
If Steemit wants to grow, the multiple accounts issue and the use of bots has to be addressed.
Multiple accounts
Give people the option to make "shadow accounts" linked to your main profile and take away the ability for the "shadow accounts" to vote for the main account. Also we need a way to make it harder for creating multiple main accounts. The verification system that is now in place is very easy to circumvent.Bots
Bots are cool, bots are the future. Give people also the option to create bots linked to their account and take away the possibility to vote on the main account just like the "shadow accounts".
Selling and buying accounts, good or bad? What do you think, let me know in the comment section.
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