@pleasestop Asking Accounts to Delegate 100% of SP!!

Important - Read This First

If you've received a reply from @steemitag (and probably an upvote), the steemconnect link in that comment will delegate all of your SP and your account will be completely locked. Let me simplify that even more.

If you follow the instructions from @steemitag your account will be completely locked and unusable!

Did I make that point clear enough?

As always, there's a story behind this, so let's jump in.

The first reply from @steemitag

I received a reply from @steemitag yesterday morning on a post from my primary account. If you look at comments by @steemitag you'll see it consistently replies shortly after a post is created, so it will be at the top of the page. Well, basically filling the entire page.

To start, this comment is absurdly oversized and horribly intrusive.

It vaguely talks about "our cause" and that you can earn "rewards" that you'll receive "in the form of dividends."

This is all perfectly clear and you understand exactly what they're doing, right? Well hold on, it gets better.

You'll see this link in the comment which is immediately followed with:

confirming your 100% SP delegation

Ok, they say it out loud at least. My opening made this point pretty clear, but we'll get back to this in a moment.

Since this link is outright dangerous and the reply overwhelmed my comments, I downvoted it.

I downvoted it from this account and from @duplitbot as well and from the three that was enough to hide it at the bottom of the page.

The second reply

I was literally dumbfounded when this account replied to another post of mine later in the day. As you'll see, I asked the account to change it so it's way smaller now.

You can read the entire dialog in that link, but it's somewhat lengthy so I'll cover the highlights. And sorry, it's still lengthy.

I basically outlined all the points I've made here and I got a reply from @haiyangdeperci, who apparently runs the @steemitag bot, saying many different things including this:

The message posted by @steemitag is as clear as it can be

Do you agree with this? After reading that comment from the image above can you tell me precisely what this bot does?

The commission that we take only serves to pay for the servers and associated cost.

Pfftt...that's nonsense. This is a simple comment/vote bot that can easily be run on a $5/month droplet at DigitalOcean.

This point I made sums it all up pretty well:

It is all the other unsuspecting accounts who may not realize what's going on that I'm worried about.

I also asked about these 'dividends' and basically demanded that those links were removed from every active comment from the @steemitag account.

I'm going to quote the reply to be as clear as possible.

I am replying to you during the weekend and even today, on Sunday, off hours

Oh wow, sorry to bother you on the weekend.

The message used to be very short but we have been accused of clendestine behaviour so we had to make our messages vivid and clear.

This is absolutely untrue. Since everything is recorded here forever I wrote a script to look at all of the comments for anything different and here is the entire list.

Why would you lie to me about this? Not that you had much credibility before, but you have absolutely none left now.

Last year, we were paying the dividends weekly or biweekly through Steem blockchain. This was ineffective for us, as the curation rewards go into SP which cannot be readily liquidated. Thus, we moved out of the Steem blockchain and utilize other ways.

Oh. My. God.

First, they trick you into delegating your entire stake to their account, but don't worry, they'll pay you air quotes 'dividends' "out of the Steem blockchain" in some way that is still not clear, but what is clear is that those transactions are not part of the immutable public ledger of the blockchain. Sorry, that's way too polite, those transactions are hidden. No. You can't look at them, stop asking.

How can you operate a project on the blockchain and then reject the entire premise upon which it is founded?

Please look at our recent client, @krystianos, who is still operating on blockchain. As you can see, it is possible to delegate to us and still do whatever one wants.

Yeah, let's look at this account.

This gets tricky, so let me break it down. You'll see this.

9.8 + 5.2 - 9.8

What this means is the account has 9.8 SP, plus an additional 5.2 SP delegated to it from another account, minus the entire 9.8 SP that was delegated to @steemitag. This account is operational only because of that additional 5.2 SP delegation.

So no, it is not possible to "delegate to [steemitag] and still do whatever one wants" unless you have an additional delegation from a third account.

Here's the math on this

VESTS and SP

The blockchain can be tricky and there's a lot of technical details that are hard to fully understand so I'm going to try to make this truly clear and understandable. I did exactly what @steemitag is asking accounts to do, I delegated my entire stake away from yet another account that I manage.

First, let's be clear on what 'entire stake' means. Just go to steemd.com and look in the upper right hand corner and you'll see this:

12,834.882080 VESTS

These gets a little complex, but in the simplest terms VESTS are your SP. This is the value we use in delegations.

If you look at comments from @steemitag and look at the steemconnect link included, then go to the steemd.com page for the accounts they are replying to, you'll see that the steemconnect link includes the exact same value that is displayed on the steemd page. To be clear, they are giving you a link to delegate your entire stake to them.

Delegating the entire stake

Again, check out steemd.com we'll see the total vests for this account.

And we can see that as SP here.

I took the steemconnect link directly from their post, but replaced my account name and the vests amount and created this exact URL:

https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=deadwitnesses&delegatee=pleasestop&vesting_shares=12834.882080%20VESTS

You'll see, the VESTS in the URL exactly matches the figure from steemd.com for my account.

And then, I delegated my entire stake, which is what @steemitag is asking accounts to do.

My account then had 0 SP.

But this is the most important line:

used 2.44kb of 0 bytes

The of 0 bytes tells us how much bandwidth this account has available, which is to say this account has zero bandwidth, which is to say, this account cannot do anything!

Removing your delegation is a blockchain operation, which requires bandwidth. But now you have none.

Yes, that's right. As soon as you delegate away your entire stake, you will not even have enough bandwidth to undelegate and take it back. And there is nothing that your account alone can do about it.

The only way to save your account is to get some SP, either buying STEEM or through a delegation from another account.

Obviously, I have another account so I tried delegating 'some' SP.

Clearly, 0.1 SP is not enough.

It took several tries but eventually I figured out that you need to delegate at least 1 SP.

And once this account had some SP again, it was able to remove the delegation.

The worst part is that it takes 7 days to get this delegation back in my account.

Whew. That was a lot of work, but hopefully this is clear enough to make the point that you should never delegate your entire stake to anyone.

What's next?

I had asked @haiyangdeperci to go back and remove the steemconnect links from every comment made by @steemitag and I didn't even receive a response on that point. Fair enough, since the links won't be removed I'll make sure everyone is aware.

I've written a script to watch for new comments from @steemitag and reply with this message:

WARNING! If you follow the instructions from @steemitag your account will be completely locked and unusable!
Take a look at this post for all the details and please consider using this link to send a small flag to discourage this behavior.

The flag is set to -15%, so nothing huge, but enough to make the point that these posts are unwanted.

I'm replying to @haiyangdeperci with a link to this post asking to remove the steemconnect link from all editable past comments and if this does not occur I will continue with my reply to these comments as well and possibly to every single comment ever made by @steemitag.

How can you help?

More than anything, I want this account to know how the community feels about this behavior.

If you read the Steem Whitepaper you'll see the crab analogy and regarding abuse it states:

It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.

The metaphor here is that we use our voting power--our downvoting power--to let @steemitag know how we feel about this behavior. I had considered the idea of working to move the reputation all the way to zero, but I don't think that will be necessary. Just sending the message should be more than enough.

Go take a look at recent replies to find one from me and click the downvote link I include. Then, change the 'voter' in the URL to your account, and change the weight as desired. It's currently set to 15% so adjust up or down from there.

This is one of the crazier things I've seen so I want to do everything possible to stop this behavior.

This post is insanely long, so if you actually made it this far please share your thoughts!