I am sharing this information as others have expressed an interest in helping. My initial investigations are in looking at currency transactions and the relationship between accounts. The first two reports I will be doing will NOT point out anything that some people might consider negative behaviors. They will simply seek to define relationships between various accounts going back to when each of the accounts began on steem/it.
I plan to make some visual charts that will show these representations in an easy to look at format.
I also plan to make my final data available. I am doing it by hand currently, but I am also checking out some ways that may speed this up a great deal for me.
Right now my first post will likely be around @berniesanders, @nextgencrypto, @engagement, @thecyclist, and @randowhale as the big accounts as well as many smaller accounts. They all seem to be either the same person, or a group of people operating those accounts. I am leaning towards an individual, but I will not state this with certainty as I will share my plans here.
I will say now to CLEAR what I implied in my previous post. @berniesanders and his collection of accounts do not appear to have been involved in my recent bot 100+ account down vote of a post a couple of days ago. @berniesanders you have my apology for that implication.
I will provide data in an unbiased form with the hope that in the future this data is quickly available and we need not repeat this process except with data that has been produced after my report.
The second large group of accounts I will focus on after I am done with this batch will focus on the group that actually down voted me of which the largest member was @steemed. I do not know the relationship of the other accounts yet as I have only given a brief look the day it happened and @complexring, and a large network of @badger# related bots were involved. I won't go into detail on that until later when I can present it just as facts without bias and guessing. I will say that currently I have not seen a direct link between that network and @berniesanders other than perhaps as being mutual acquaintances. I will not push for guilt by association as I do not agree with that.
In this case it still seems that though @berniesanders and I have disagreed a number of times over the year he has still not flagged me. Thank you for this bernie.
After that I will likely look into the @noganoo network for comparison purposes. There is a lot of information to collect, collate, and consider. I cannot state with certainty where it will take me.
This data is worth collecting and I've been doing it primarily through steemdb. I am going to look at steemdata and see if that can speed up some of the process.
Planned Report
I am tracking where steem and steem backed dollars (SBD) have been sent, and I've been mostly ignoring the small transactions. I am not keeping a count of these transactions in my current research just a running total. This also includes transfers too and from exchanges. Where memos are available I am keeping a list of those.
I believe if we see frequent transfers to/from accounts and particularly if they are large they increase the obvious relationship as either being the same person, or at the very least show signs of a group of people that work together for mutual gain/power.
In the cases of the memos. If we have transfers being sent to the same memo at an exchange from different accounts then that is an even stronger relationship.
With this data I should be able to plot a chart that shows these relations. It would be similar to a scatter graph, but I want to make some that are easy to look at and I'll prune some of the lesser accounts off of some of those charts.
That is my plan. For those of you that talk about Preminers. This process also points out such activities and lends some insight into that. The term preminers for those that don't think it exists refers to people who mined steem before the steemit website went live, and before there really was a way for anyone other than miners to participate.
People could have participated in that IF they knew about it, and had the wherewithal to mine. Apparently according to @berniesanders he first heard about it on Bitcoin Talk.
He has moved millions of steem around and out to exchanges and likely a lot of it back into other accounts since he has been here. Steem for him has been a lot like winning the lottery, though it does require more WORK than simply getting a lottery ticket.
@berniesanders also contributed quite a bit to @curie, @steemcleaners, and @steemservices and I will have that information in my data as well. That is supporting projects with the aim of strengthening and protecting our community.
As stated I will present my initial reports with as little bias as I can and try to provide just the data and the facts. That will be the foundational information upon which further investigations and more speculative discussions can be had.
For those of you that wanted to help. You now know my plan. If you want to do something in parallel I would greatly welcome it. Let us shine some light into the cobweb infested corners of the steem past.
To all of the morons that keep referencing a premine...
I'm posting this comment here because you are the first to make this point, but I will downvote the OP (@dwinblood) for attempting to re-define the term "premine". This is going to be a big downvote.
The term premine has been used in cryptocurrency for years and refers to the developers' mining a coin before launch of the block chain. Technically, the steem developers claim steem is not a premine, although that claim has been publicly debated (the short of it is that they relaunced the chain to gain an acceptable number of coins, effectively making it a premine).
People who are not developers, and that includes @berniesanders, can not premine a coin, BY DEFINITION.
The term "premine" has nothing to do with any associated website.
Re-defining terms to suit one's agenda is a downvotable offense and will be treated accordingly.
@dwinblood: remove the term "premine" and make up a new one to use, otherwise a big downvote is coming.
I replied on you post rather than here.
Premine is very definitely the wrong term. If you must, use Dan's term: "ninjamine."
Every time I used it I put it in quotes as I was using a term as OTHER people had stated it. I actually don't care so much about the fact people were in the right place at the right time. I like NinjaMine though.
I think I've always been aware that pre-mined is incorrect, but I didn't realise how emotive a term in was, perhaps with legitimate reasons. What strikes me now that all the alternative prefixes to mine don't really escape the problem: they are all verb or verb-like. Could I suggest early whales, or even The April Whales, as a better reference? What is interesting is not how they became whales, but how they have acted since, and IMHO @berniesanders is way in credit. @dan is not.
I like that term.
The (T)ides of March!
Is flashmine the same thing?
No clue. Sorry I don't know the answer to that.
I like flashmine, is that the same thing?
I also did just see the email notice. I pay more attention to steem replies than my personal email.
@dwinblood
I am too new to know what all this is about, but I have been fascinated as I learn what can be and is done here: From sharing SP, creating additional accounts, etc. And while I don't like it when plots and account creations are done for purposes detrimental to the STEEMIT ecosystem, ISN'T a key purpose of cryptocurrencies meant to be anonymity? Does this investigation go against the grain of the platform?
Or is anonymity more for Bitcoin, etc and not a real component here at Steemit...since, afterall, all of our wallets are open and visible.
If you want to look into something bizarre, checkout @ angel
On this account, the older transactions, there is a HUGE line of accounts depositing small amounts into angel. These accounts are almost all three letter or short account names. Kinda looks like someone setup 1000 accounts, built up 20-100 Steem in each one, then consolidated them.
I didn't go down the rabbit hole any further....but sounds a little about some of the work you are undertaking!!
Curious to see what you find! Love learning about this complex kraken that we 'live in.'
Best to you,
Peace!!!
✌
Some currencies are for anonymity. You can be anonymous here, but the transactions cannot. It is the only way we can prevent people from abusing the system and ruining it for everyone. So what is on the blockchain is and will always be public. At least this blockchain.
So if you do anything on the blockchain here then it is public knowledge. That may be why so many of the actions of people happen outside of steemit. Places like steemit.chat, discord, etc.
no, quiet the opposite, my friend. The big plus about the cryptos are their transparency. The blockchain is meant to be one large script of all transactions that have been ever made. Because everybody can check the script there can be no manipulation of the actual currency. With this method we don't rely on an institution (bank) to manage our money.
At least that is what I understood.
This is great stuff, it is almost like reading a detective novel and keeping up with the story as it develops is suspenseful. I am learning tons about Steemit from this and the comments, I hope other minnows are in on this, it really is eye opening and helps me understand the steemit ecosystem better.
Fortunately there are only a few people that are so large and powerful that it is difficult for the community to counter. For the most part this is a manageable situation on steemit by the community with the exception of those that are so powerful they are virtually untouchable.
Mhh.. @steemed's post about the quasi-decentralisation of Steemit was definitely a nice read :D. He also talks about having a "list of writers"- I guess referring to a list of others he auto-upvotes. Looking at how tight his voting circle is in recent days I dont expect that to have changed.
Well Steemed and Bernie (in his nextgencrypto role) both flagged my other post from the other day about if you go in looking for idiocy, then idiocy is what you will find.
Note: It was not abusive, it was not spam, it was not plagiarism, and it did inspire a lot of discussion. So that leaves either they thought the rewards were too high even though it clearly was more substantial than Bernie's own post which was making more than it for a couple of paragraphs calling out people like me as morons (I was specifically listed in the title of his article). So doesn't seem disagreement over rewards is valid either.
Thus, yet another example proving my point on my past few articles on the subject.
Because you have integrity. And dare I say, common sense.
How can you know whether or not an account is a bot account?
How can you know that a group of interrelated accounts are the accounts of a single user, and not a group of interconnected individuals?
I don't care whether it is a bot or not. Bots are still controlled by someone. If one account is powering up the bots and they are working together that either is an individual or a group controlling them.
I did not say I could tell. I said it could be either of those. My goal is not to define which are and are not bots. My goal is to show the financial relationships between the accounts.
Ok, let me re-read this. Are there any other previous blogs I might need to read?
That depends upon what your objective is. If your objective is to challenge me then I can't tell which blogs you might wish to read. I provided the two posts I spoke about as hyperlinks in this document.
There are other people doing their own different investigations with some overlap.
The purpose of this post was to state what I am doing as there have been those expressing an interest in helping. I thus described what I am currently doing and what I PLAN to do. If someone beats me to what I PLAN to do I am totally okay with this. I am not doing this for status, following, etc. I am doing this so the information that is relevant to further investigation is available in a format easier to mentally digest without having to repeat this process every time we pose a hypothesis and then go to put it to the test.
Hey, I'm new here. I don't really understand what's going on. :)
I do tend to ask questions like those above for clarification and to check. It's not a challenge, if I ask (in this instance)"How would you know if you hit your target from 100 miles away?" it doesn't matter to me if you shoot at your target, only trying to help you verify that you hit it when you do.
I'm not sure what's going on, ATM. :)
Ok. Thanks for the clarification. I was not sure why you were asking. Thus I said it depends upon your objective. :)
As to other posts. Stay tuned as myself and others will be providing more information as it becomes available. There are older posts, but it'd take me some time to dig them up and my initial reports will not be about slinging dirt at anyone so those older posts are mostly irrelevant for the first stages of the investigation.
It's a good idea but how can you relate account each other!
i' following interesting idea
If they are sending money out to the same exchange account numbers at bittrex, poloniex, etc then they are likely the same person. Unless a group of people are sharing proverbial bank accounts.
If they are sending large amounts of steem back and forth between the accounts the same is also true, but not as certain. When I say large amounts this is often in the greater than 100,000 steem amount.
Sure wish I had Bernie Sander's bank accounts along with his bitcoin account. I'm sure he is loaded. Thanks for the informative post. upvote, resteemed. Cheers.
Not super informative yet, other than defining my plans so others can join in if they want. Future posts on this will hopefully be informative.
Pretty interesting stuff @dwinblood. Will be watching to see what you find.
Looking forward to the results!
Thank you for sharing your approach and plans with us. From my data this is not confined to 'the cobweb infested corners of the steem past.' in fact, I believe that there are new steemit whales acting in the same way
There are. That was just me taking a stab as some flowery phrase. :) I do that from time to time.
Most of the new steemit whales are the same as the old steemit whales they just move steem around. At least that is what I am seeing.
ran across this post
https://steemit.com/steemit-police/@sherlockholmes/case-7-raping-the-reward-pool-with-1700-accounts-things-are-getting-serious
if it helps
Thank you... my network engineering job has kept me busy this week with research on that side, so I plan to do more on this over the weekend.
I figgered you would get to it in due time. Since your posting slowed down recently, I figgered you were keys-down here and there ;>
Just for your own sanity, don't let yourself feel rushed on any of this!
Sounds like a good plan. Please keep at it!
resteemed