"We can prevent them from interacting with the blockchain to vote, and post, and we should."
There's the rub...
The genie is already out of the bottle. Bots are already voting, posting and curating.
How do you propose we stop account holders from running bots that interact with the blockchain?
Edit: whoops! I assumed you were @bot-or-not. I apologize. Please disregard the parts of my reply intended for them personally. The answer to your question is below.
I have to ask you to answer my question. I ask you to answer it substantively, and forthrightly, because I am not trying to trick, or mislead, or promoting an agenda.
I don't care about my rewards, and I've never spent a satoshi of Steem, nor have any plans to.
I spent more than 12 hours on @blocktrades post on making curation more profitable, and saw a comment that @leotrap made to @timcliff, proposing that an 'authenticator' be placed on a post that prevented bots from voting on it.
Basically, a captcha, or 2FA, reveals a public key which allows one to vote on the post. Without the key, the blockchain does not allow the vote.
@netuoso, according to @timcliff, says that captchas can be solved. I have no doubt this is true. I also note that they are in wide use across the internet, and greatly reduce the amount of spam, scams, and bots.
It isn't perfect, but it will pretty much end the overwhelming of human curation by bots.
Now, I have forthrightly answered your question. Please tell me the honest truth why you don't want that to happen.
Thanks!
As a public disclosure. I run @torqewrench1969 and @bot-or-not .
As for the captcha and 2fa filtering systems, I am not against the philosophically.
I do see practical issues affecting theusage of captcha and 2fa.
Users have a fixed amount of time per day, and for them to spend the time to solve a captcha or a 2fa problem, it would have to be very important to need to post or vote. If a completely "bot-free" environment is needed, it had better be very important, just due to the time it would be needed for the users to verify they are not a bot.
Secondly, capture and 2fa will only filter out bots for so long. The technology and programming will always improve, so the use of captcha and 2fa are only bandaids on the proported "problem".
Thirdly, is the expense implementing captcha and 2fa aren't free. Someone will have to pay for it. If they can get it at the proper price point, it might be feasible to implement them in some instances.