"The WHOLE POINT of the steem blockchain is that this decision making is DECENTRALISED, with power to make these decisions in the hand of INVESTORS, those that hold SP, proportional to their investment."
Those 37 accounts, out of upwards of a million accounts that have been opened on Steemit, wield the vast majority of VP, and thus power is centralized in those accounts, and not decentralized at all.
Almost all of that stake held by those 37 accounts was mined and not purchased for fiat, I believe.
True, but that is a whole other issue, and not one easily addressed. Steem is still relatively decentralised compared to facebook, twitter or reddit.
I have given this thought, and reckon it's not a separate issue at all, but the very heart of the issue.
First, the supposition that those competent and fortunate enough to be able to mine Steem during the attempt to avoid US regulations during it's inception are investors is ludicrous. Those folks that simply mined and held on didn't invest in the sense investment generally has meaning.
This establishes that their motivations and experience are different from actual investors, who depend on capital gains for their ROI. Speculators, traders, and profiteers are other things entirely. the whales on Steemit are practically universally not investors.
Since they aren't investors, and aren't intent on capital gains for their ROI, they seek ROI by other means, and those means have become bidbots. This is the root of the point of this post OP has made.
This is what profiteering looks like, and as is usual, profiteering is a short term gambit, that almost always sucks all value from the source of profits before moving along with the essential value and leaving the shriveled husk of the endeavor abandoned in their wake.
I see but little sign that whales as a group have any intention to grow Steemit into a platform nominal to provide the substantial capital gains investors would be intent on. Such ROI would dwarf the meager returns rewards pool mining provides. The means of guiding Steemit to generate such returns in unfamiliar to them, as they are not seasoned investors, nor even actually investors at all.
They do what they know, and that is mine.
That is not a separate issue, and is the issue at hand.
Other than moving to an alternative platform, perhaps one based on EOS, I don't see any particular solution other than perhaps attempting to make the bidbots unprofitable to use. Hurt their scheme by hurting its customers.
It's being done. It won't be enough.
The real fly in the soup is stake-weighting, which will precipitate profiteering without fail. Even on Steemit v.2 that @dan is building. Given his sentiments, I expect stake-weighting to feature on his new platform.
Before there were bots, there was circle-jerking, and self-votes. Actually, there have always been bots, but it's a veritable infestation now. Much worse than before.
Dealing with stake-weighting may solve the bot problem.
A cure worse than the disease, according to some. I disagree, but I'm not very avaricious.