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"Folks that are only interested in maximizing profits should just go mine BTC."

Unfortunately, as long as it remains more profitable or easier to "mine" Steem via abuse than to invest in another DPOS coin or mine something via POW, we're going to see this issue.

It would be interesting to see an environment where accounts with no purchased stake actually have 0 vote weight, making spam less profitable outside bots...but I guess you'll still have the problem of trash post bot spam.