We all know @wang the friendly bot that automatically upvotes a lot of posts and sometimes post replies (which are the same in every thread). I was wondering what kind of pull that bot had in this community so I had a look at the stats and it kind of shocked me.

This is a huge potential issue. You have newbies that try to upvote everything to get some extra steempower and that's fine, the will see that it's not worthwhile and stop and only upvote the good posts.

However I think the issue of bots is a lot bigger issue. Reddit already has an issue of voting bots and there is no real incentive yet, just making your post more or less popular. However when you introduce the financial aspect of Steemit in the mix I think we have a potential big issue.

This is just one bot and he has an estimated value of $ 130,000 which really is insane (kudo's to the guy who's managing it, you're quite the visionary). The platform needs to protect itself, there will always be manipulation but it has to be made as difficult as possible. It can be as simple as complex captcha's that you need to complete to post/upvote something. I'm not an expert, I'm sure there are people here with a lot more knowledge that can help the community.