Dan, I've been shouting this in the comments everywhere for weeks!! People pay to advertise, let them pay to promote on STEEM, by burning STEEM.

Asking bidbot owners to burn a part of their rewards probably won't work. What we need is Steemit, Inc to make a statement saying that every bidbot not burning 20% (or 50% or any percentage) of his rewards will get COMPLETELY downvoted to 0$. This will make people stop using that bidbot.

This is centralized, yes. But otherwise STEEM is just waiting for more and more people to use it. Two reasons why that is bad:
1- It sometimes take too long, and low prices mean less people so vicious circle to the downside.
2-What happens when all of the internet users are on Steem? growth will completely stop and It can only go down, so logically that will make everyone sell.

Conclusion: STEEM needs a sink, even if it is enforced. Not every problem in life can be solved in a centralized way.