Why Downvotes Won't Always be FREE

After the Hard Fork 21 everyone is excited to get 25% free Downvoting Power and happy to use them mostly to control reward pool 'abuse'. But how long will this continue?

IMHO, I don't think that downvotes will always be free as they are today.

Since free Downvoting is limited to only 25% of Upvoting power, it's by definition a scarce resource. Most resources that are available for free in this world eventually starts carrying a price tag when their demand or scarcity increases with time.

To give you a perspective that you can easily relate to is to take into account the fact that Upvotes were considered absolutely free during the initial period of Steem. But everyone got only a limited Voting Power everyday, making this a scarce resource. It didn't take long for people to realize the value of Upvotes and Upvotes get scarcer with the increase in content sharing & greed to get the maximum share of the reward pool. This gave way to several vote exchange platforms, delegation markets. vote selling bots and bid bots, Bid bots didn't evolve overnight but were the result of market needs.

Similarly, Downvotes are free today but we should understand that these are scarce resource too. Currently, people are downvoting in their individual capacity. But a small account like mine isn't capable of any significant downvote value (so mostly, it is lying unutilized at 100% power). Soon people will start following some downvote curation trail to put their Downvoting Power to better use. But then there is some market for downvote retaliation and downvote war too. However small it may be now but it sure exists. Apart from retaliation & war, there are many other use cases for downvotes too.

So I hope, in future, there will be some market and bots for sell & purchase of Downvoting Power. Of course, they won't cost us as much as Upvotes but nevertheless they will cost/earn something.

This is one of my perspectives on Downvoting Power.