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