Hi @penguinpablo !
Why did @steemit2 send 399,000 STEEM to @bithumb.hot yesterday? That's a huge amount!
Who is selling his coins at this insane low price?
If you look at this transaction a week ago, it seems it's @steemit (Stinc I suppose) who is selling its coins at such a low price (or maybe they are putting it on Bithumb for another reason, but I don't see what reson it could be).
It seems @steemit2 (with the funds coming from @steemit) is selling 400k STEEM on the market every week no matter the price at the moment (maybe it's the cashflow for expenditures for Stinc, I don't know).
For quite some time I have been wondering how Steemit Inc pays there bills? How do they generate an income?
And without being 100% certain it would be most logical they earned money from an ICO sale. Or by selling some of their Steem or SBD.
So your answer could be correct.
I don't see @steemit2 selling this amount every week. So I miss something? I do see they transferred 1.4mln Steem to @alpha in the last 3 months. And who is @alpha? @alpha received big amounts from @buildawhale and @appreciator, but why? Almost on a daily basis this @alpha transfers thousands of Steem to @bitrex. So this person could be a millionaire by now.
There is also a @steemit3 account. That transferred 3,000 Steem to deepcrypto8 about 2 weeks ago.
And another thing I don't get is that @steemit2 and @steemit3 transfer to some accounts with strange names like @fdcb934e6cce @c75c39f25a90 @ae54ac1ac510. From all these accounts the Steem seems to be transferred to @eeqj. And @eeqj used to sell 10-20k per month via @blocktrades. But the last time, 2 months ago, they transferred 55k Steem to @deepcrypto8 and since then it stopped.
What is all happening here?
Thanks a lot for your detective work :D
@alpha is Bittrex (I remember @penguinpablo telling me that two or three weeks ago). @deepcrypto8 is Binance.
We also see patterns like that :
My opinion on the subject :
Steemit is paying his developers / contributors / charges (expenses) directly with the pre-mined Steem from the launch of Steem in 2016 (and maybe other schemes, like returns on delegations, arrangements with witnesses, everything is possible, etc...).I just saw @steemit2 doing transfers every week to either @alpha or @bithumb.hot for the last month. Before that it doesn't seem that regular. There are also some big transfers to @blocktrades (600k STEEM 3 months ago). There's a lot of transfers between the different @steemit accounts.
For the encrypted accounts
I don't know what it is, but it surely ain't normal.
All this should strongly advocate for an improve in transparency from Stinc. First of all, the distribution of STEEM and the pre-mining of the coin by Stinc is not good practice but such opacity in what they're doing with these ill-obtained coins should really be the priority. Not taking into account the legal issues that could happen later (as all this could be associated with undeclared labor - and in the worst case money laundering - by all the tax departments around the world).
My best guess is also that Steemit Inc uses their pre mined Steem to pay their expenses. Either by selling it first for usd/eur or by directly transferring it to the account of someone they hired.
But isn't that the same as what happens with most ICO's?
I agree they could and should be more open about it. Cause most likely we could find out most of we investigate this thoroughly.
Where I live this does not necessarily lead to tax issues. If a person earns income via Steemit it should be declared as income and income tax needs to be paid. Of course it could be that this is not happening since our tax authority has very small chance to control this. But I think I'm quite sure they will notice as soon as you pay out material amounts. And also the Dutch banks most likely will notice this and react on it. So that part should be pretty okay in the Netherlands.
We're on the same page, I'm not opposed to paying wages in STEEM but it should be more transparent. Of course, in the real world, there's little to no transparency on these subjects, but it could be yet another argument for crypto-currencies. There's such a quantity of Steem Power and liquid STEEM detained by the "founders" that they could easily crash the value or organize pumps and dumps (and seeing large transfers like that, it may be to cover expanses, it could also be for manipulating prices, and with no information, we can only speculate). None of these two options are good for Steemit, so they should be accountable, transparent and responsible. And to clarify my position, I'm all for rewarding people for their work, I don't want payments from Stinc to stop, I want them to be bigger (in amount, in the projects they're supporting, I'm also supporting Stinc delegating to community accounts, etc.), but with justification and traceability. Seeing they currently focus on becoming more of a "real organization", they must thinking about these aspects right now.
To cite the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen of 1789, even if Stinc has no obligation to comply with these standards : The society has the right of requesting an account from any public agent of its administration.
There's a gap between claiming to be a decentralized representative democracy (with DPOS furthermore, but that's another debate) and being one.
For the tax problem, I live in France (but I think it's the same thing in all of Europe), and the people receiving the wage pays taxes (income tax) but the employers also pay taxes (to finance social security, unemployment insurance, etc.) and that's what they're evading (Stinc). And when States will put their noses in it, it's easier to put pressure on one entity that has a lot of due taxes, than to scatter efforts on all the little amounts due by the "receivers".
Given that the steem graphene-like blockchain is a distributed public ledger, not sure how much more transparency is actually needed. Steemit Inc would in theory; not do a massive sell-off as this is counter-productive to the growth of steemit.
For the distributed ledger, OK all transactions can be seen, you won't be able to do much more on the Steem blockchain. But you can't see what's happening on the exchanges, so it's Steemit Inc.'s role to clarify and explain their actions.
For the manipulations, sure, Steemit Inc has no interest to dump the price.
But the real questions are
Who is really behind these accounts ? Who has the owner keys ? For me, it seems like Steemit Inc., the @steemit accounts, the founders' accounts, all that seems a bit confused, and with no clear links of who owns what and no transparency of propriety, it's hard to see where the real interests lie.
Steemit Inc. has interest in the long term growth of Steem but who tells me they're the ones with the real power and with the highest stake in this ?