For me, it is a question of capital.

At the moment there is a significant amount of surplus capital floating around the Steem ecosystem. Passive investor whales, orcas and dolphins who hold large amounts of Steem Power want to put that capital to work.

The capital flows to where it can obtain the best return. Currently that would be 100% self-voting but since that attracts flags the next best return is bid-bots. 

In order to move the capital away from bid-bots one of three things needs to happen:

• The existence of a better offer for passive investors.
• The existence of an offer that approaches that from bid-bots but with strong marketing that promotes the overall good of Steem. 
• The reduction of the existing return passive investors obtain from bid-bots to a level below other current offers of return.

1. A better offer for passive investors

There is potential for SMTs to offer a better return for passive investors over the long-term. All dApps need capital to function and provide upvotes to users and as the number of dApps increases so will the calls for capital. Whilst the short-term returns are unlikely to match those of bid-bots, the potential return from owning a piece of a successful dApp could far outweigh the short-term return from bid-bots.

An alternative here is ocdb, a better bid-bot with higher returns for investors but better control over how the upvotes can be purchased.

2. An offer that approaches that from bid-bots but with strong marketing that promotes the overall good of Steem

The proposals for the move to 50/50 curation fall into this category. The attractiveness of higher curation rewards could tempt passive investors away from bid-bots, or at least stem the flow of new capital into bid-bots. This could be combined with the message of how manual curation can lead to better organic content discovery which would encourage better content which would raise the price of Steem. 

However I'm unconvinced that the underlying numbers really stack up for this option, even if it could represent a step in the right direction. It also impacts dApps that are currently working well under the 75/25 split.

3. The reduction of the existing return passive investors obtain from bid-bots to a level below other current offers of return.

For me, proposals for a separate downvote fund fall into this category. The threat of people collectively downvoting bid-bot posts boosted to trending, or repeat bid-bot users, could reduce demand for bid-bots and have a significant impact on the returns available for passive investors. If those returns fall far enough then there is potential for that capital to move to other projects. However it is not clear whether this would actually occur in practice. Bid-bot owners would also have a strong hold over the level of downvotes available.

A combination of 2 (raise returns available elsewhere) and 3 (lower bid-bot returns) underlies the proposals to rebalance Steem away from bid-bots towards active manual curators. However it seems unlikely that this will be implemented before SMTs arrive. 

For me, SMTs remain the best hope for a change to the overall Steem economy. Fingers crossed.

https://i.imgur.com/fcS8JH2.jpg

Delegating to bot or selling a vote is like an indirect or passive self voting through proxies like bid bots and the ecosytem at the moment is somewhat designed in that way.

What exactly happening out there is that:-

1. A new comer joins steemit and want to make his post visible then he has to go through promotional tools like bid-bots or instant bots where he gets roughly 10% extra for the bid amount and when the price of steem fluctuates significantly then at times this 10% extra may result in losses also, but whatever it is, bid-bots are not primarily aimed at making a return to the bidder. 
2. Those who have stake in steem in the form of steem power like whales, orcas, dolphins they can not self upvote daily and after HF20 self upvoting is even more useless but they always want their capital or invested amount to work in their favor and I think the bid-bots are doing that job by keeping a certain percentage. Like you have SP, you can delegate it to any bid-bot and in turn they will keep a small amount and rest they will give it to you. But don't you think it is also a kind of proxy self upvoting. It is true that through delegation from many players you are bringing liquidity to a common platform from where again it is flowing outward and making the system liquid but somehow I feel that there is something wrong or rather there is a conflict of interest.
3. In short term, I believe that bid-bots are going to stay here and many bots may emerge in, if the price of steem goes high again but in the long run like 2 or 3 years down the line there will be a framework within which the bid bots have to work because the bid bots are also making it a business hub in the name of promotion, not to forget that steemit has been a beautiful place even without bid bots and the disadvantage of the bot is to the extent that, we very often see shit post in the trending page and this is just because we have so many bid-bots people are using that tool to get it to the trending page.
4. In decentralized ecoystem it is really hard to make sturdy frame work as you can not oppose inherent qualities of people, rather one can only channelize the things in a better way for the greater interest of the community and at the same time keeping the spirit of decentralization intact. 

So the bottom line is that we may not see it die but its influence and forceful presence will die definitely in the long run as steemit is still in its infancy stage and once we have more mass adoption and once we become a place like other parallel centralized social media platform, then definitely the dependency on bid-bots will be minimal.

Thank you and Have a great day.

They will probably die once SMTs arrive. If you look at what @ned said right here (https://steempeak.com/steemfest/@ned/re-twinner-re-steemitblog-steemfest-q-and-a-what-do-you-want-to-ask-ned-20181026t011406827z) it clearly makes the impression that bid bots and vote selling as a whole will go down a lot

If we stay in this exact environment without a new HF, they will almost certainly stay.

They will die if they cannot make money. 

Don't buy up-votes and give crap to anyone you know who buys up-votes.

Either that, of just withdraw your vests from Steemit. 

While I may not be able to see into the future, I see steem bidbots usage and influence reducing in coming months, if not totally out of business.

Bidbots is having a counter effect on the the main aim of the blockchain, as a place where you get rewarded by others like you (not bots) based on your creativity and contribution. Bidbots is taking that away.

It makes the steem blockchain looks like a Ponzi scheme of some sort, paying money to earn more money. This has reduced the creativity and strive for it considerably.

I like the fact that these bidbots created out of greed are getting greedier and at such their influence are waning. The larger percentage of their customers are minnows who their 'self vote' value amount to almost nothing.

A lot of these minnows have realised that they are not getting real profit from buying votes. Most people still see the light and prefer having $0.something in their post reward rather than paying a bit to return a marginal profit or loss.

To make this possible, there has to be efforts from the team to empower dapps and other community projects to be more valuable and 'dutiful' to investors to invest in to invest in for profit in curation and cutting off some blood from this bidbots.

People will have enthusiasm investing in these projects that are contributing to the growth of the blockchain that houses their investment while making curation of that..

Though i believe their influence will wane and more people will see the threat they pose to the blockchain but steem  has to make decisions to reduce their influence and speed up their death.

My opinion....