Behind Steemit #8 - Alts, Money and an OpenLedger Account, what could go wrong?

in #steemit7 years ago

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In this project we will not accuse anyone, we will only show the information that goes unnoticed by the common user, and even, for the whales.

Report nº8

While investigating, using SteemJS and the function “Look-up accounts” (tool for accounts research and data info) we find out more tan 500 accounts / bots in the Steem chain with a similar name, probably owned by the same person.

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...and this situation keeps going and going and going and going until about the item 400 incrementing the prefix "a1i" to "a2i" and "a3i" and "a4i", etc"

So we took one of these many accounts...

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...It's an old Steem miner

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Another one, no SP

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57k Steem out of Steemit.

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All these accounts transfered money at some point to @remembering

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See something odd?
Almost every accounts also send Steem to the americansilver OL account
So we searched a little bit

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And we came up with this user. The same transfers pattern and users
And we add more users to the list
@bonapartist, @unconciously and @mademoiselle

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Who is @bonapartist?

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And why is he powering down?
From only 2 months ago

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Here are the accounts from where he got his money
And, again, americansilver from OL

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  • This is just the tip of the iceberg, we have tons of information that we will we posting eventually. Hope you guys can support us to make a more clean and transparent community.

LET'S UNVEIL THE TRUTH

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Means what??

Lol, looks like it means someone is trying to keep their transactions private, and the author feels compelled to expose it. But, yes, I have to agree, what point beyond that is the author trying to make?

Every day new Sherlock in town. Thanks for the comment.

for me reading this post the problem I see is that when newer accounts do something like this it is seen as suspicious

Take a look at this post
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@crokkon/cashout-chains-steem-from-7400-accounts-leaves-steem-via-only-a-few-accounts

so seeing older accounts do the same thing is also suspicious

You see cash out rings could be a few things. And as you say @blocktrades one could be that the person just wants to keep their transactions private ( but that then opens up the question on what is right or wrong with having alt accounts and how many is enough?)

I am sure you are familiar with the EU AML regulations. Having studied this in detail as a CPA auditor, these are the kind of things that would raise flags when doing an Audit. I guess its in my training.

So I would say nice find because there is a heap of data to look at to find stuff like this, and a serious amount of time must have been put into this. Maybe the point is 'Big brother is watching' so if there are people thinking of doing something not in favor of the community , posts like this might put them off

Yes, I understand why you could think all that, I suppose it's normal for CPAs who have to be on the lookout for that kind of thing. But as an experienced cryptocurrency/steem guy, it's also obvious to me what's really going on: somebody early on was mining steem. This process created a bunch of accounts as a side effect. Then they moved that steem out of those accounts to sell some of it. It's far from a mystery.

Now, did I spend a lot of time figuring this out and making a post about it? No, all I had to do was look just now at one of those accounts on the steem blockexplorer:

https://steemd.com/@z1i-5e18b0eb

See that "found a pow", that means the user mined steem (found a proof-of-work), then transferred it from the mining account and sold it off (back in mid 2016, by the way). The fact that they sold it off via bitshares is also not surprising, many of the early steem miners are bitshares people.

To me this isn't very exciting news, it's what most crypto miners do: they make their profit off mining and selling the coin they mine.

I suppose this answers a lot of questions I had. So mining Steem had the side effect of creating a bunch of accounts? This is something I was not aware off (because my experience is not in crypto) Is this the case with all coins that can be mined?

Selling an investment is not a mystery either, that's the idea right! and early adapters/investors take the biggest risk right and hence high rewards. I get that too.

I think the bigger thing here for me is the double standards. If it is okay for the older accounts then it must be okay for the new accounts too and all 'witch hunts' should stop, steemcleaners should stop, cheetah should stop and we should all do as we please. A small few will end up with a lot of profit and steemit will become known as nothing more than a ponzi scheme

I dont have $$$ to invest in Steemit, but I do have time and I want steemit to be successful. I am a business person, and some of the stuff I have seen happen here on steemit I would say is nothing but genius ( I wish I was a genius and a developer for that matter lol ). For me looking at the data is not to expose, but to learn, and by posting on it, I get to understand the politics and find out what is and is not acceptable by the community.

While I have your attention @blocktrades a recent post I did has given rise to a lot of conversation behind the scenes. There are places in the world Steemit can really help, one of which I had identified in the post. The conversations behind the scenes went on the lines of how can I get big whales (just like you) to curate more posts and invest more in certain identified tags. So I would ask you to take a read of the post and reach out to me on chat or discord and give me a few min of your time

https://steemit.com/bisteemit/@paulag/steemit-good-news-story-1-attacking-global-poverty-with-steem-and-steemit

guessing you didn't hover over that link - it links to Steemit where you can sign up for... free... if you are interested in making alt accounts there are two main games in town and this post covers both of them:
https://steemit.com/news/@timcliff/new-tool-from-busy-org-create-new-steem-blockchain-accounts-with-steemconnect

I use the tool from busy.org that uses steemconnect and allows you to pay with STEEM, currently 6 STEEM to create an account I believe but the post I linked explains how to calculate that value. Cheers

Hi, and now I read just a few comments down, and see someone even bothered to figure out who the miner most probably was. He's a friend of mine. He's a super nice guy, as straight-arrow as they come.

@blocktrades Perfect, that's what we actually want. We only point out some weird transactions that we find out without accusing anynone (as you asked - what we were trying to prove?).

You just explained us and the entire Steemit community, why these bunch of accounts exists, THAT'S what we want. There's a bunch of post were minnows ask these question themselves getting a lot of comments with "they're stealing our money", "those accounts are the result of hackers".

We just present the info and let the people decide wether it's right or wrong, and, let a space to keep the people that is being accused to defend themselves freely. Thank you for that.

For example, this transaction was later erased from the Steemd and will be presented in the next posts but maybe someone can give us any asnwer about it. Right now, for us, it's a really strange transaction.

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Send my bitcoin to my bitcoin wallet

That account americansilver votes as @xeroc on bitshares
https://cryptofresh.com/u/americansilver

early bitshares
early steemit