No, I'm just saying that you and the other guy up on the north side of the map have your own little thing going on, largely unconnected to the rest of the whales which I was tracking the transactions of for that month.
I'm not saying that those transfers are anything particular, though now I'm starting to wonder if I should have.
If you're really going to try to read subtext into what I was saying, you should probably also have noticed that I referred to the rats nest of interrelated transactions to yourself as "incestuous." Which would suggest that whatever your own thing going on up north – it's not having sex with your immediate relatives.
Some people would read that positively.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader.
I only wish I had discovered some form of conspiracy. Instead, what I discovered is that most of the transactions that take place between whale accounts involve the same set of actors beyond those accounts, which makes one wonder about the number of bots which are being funded or which are effectively functioning as displaced SP for mass voting purchase.
Interpretation is, again, left as an exercise for the reader – but it's certainly a field of inquiry that would be interesting.
I don't know what you were doing with Gandalf, but I have heard that a wizard's staff has a knob on the end. That's all I know. I do know that, at least for that 30 day period, Gandalf didn't make any transactions with any other of the 50%+ whales, so he's got that going for him.
OK, so here's some explanation about Gandalf
Gandalf the G
Story behind it is simple, I usually move out liquid funds from an account that I use on a daily basis. Also I was delegating SP there as I used posting authority to allow streemian to follow some curation patterns (well known curators and authors) unfortunately there were some technical issues then change in ownership so that account stopped curation (hopefully it will be back at some point).
Oh, also I was delegating SP to others like Power Up for newbies TLDR: it's just me. When I was registering @gandalf was already taken, so I chose @gtg, as in rey, later I got @gandalf as a gift from the nice guys. or support for #steemstem (their curators).
Why I'm telling those stories?
Steem is transparent in a way that we have an access to every transaction going on here, so it's hard to hide, even if you temporarily can add obscurity to your actions, it will stay on the blockchain forever.
Interpretation is important here, also perception of what we call an abuse.
Knowledge about how certain real-life motives looks like when translated to certain blockchain operations helps in further interpretation of observed patterns.
On a platform where there are money involved, there's a temptation for quick gains, that however that hurts the platform and those who are investing their time, efforts and money to make the platform great.
Many of them are the "whales", "orcas", and "dolphins".
In the end - they have most to lose.
(Or in case of some, they are just stupid enough to cut the branch they are sitting on.)
But already figured it was something like that, mainly because we don't normally see that kind of pattern of transaction between two accounts. Either they have lots of in and outs or they have a very small circle of in an outs. A cluster of ins and one out? That's different, and worth looking at.
I'm pretty sure that I wasn't tracking delegation in that particular set of transfers, just literal fund transfers – but I'd have to go back and look harder at the database query I used to know for sure. My gut says that delegation has an entirely different type tag and I wasn't querying for that.
At this point, I just see it as interesting to reveal patterns. No one else has been particularly interested in graph theory and the analysis of transactions in the blockchain, so I saw it as an opportunity to do something that looks really cool when I discovered that I had MongoDB access to the backend.
And it does look really cool.
Thankfully, I do so without moral judgment. There is one act that I find to be particularly pernicious on this platform and it is one that is considered socially well accepted: flagging. It's a mathematical waste of your time, but there are a number of people who seem to revel in the fact that it provides you a certain amount of power over an individual at a given time, even if it manages to violate the intent that you had in the first place.
Maybe that's an entirely different post. I've talked about it before.
There are lots of operations on the blockchain that I think are probably nonoptimal for doing what the declared mission of Steemit as a company and operation have said, but a number of those things have been done by Steemit as a company and operation so… Getting too carried away dropping judgment on whales is probably wasted energy.
There is a lot of active stupidity, however. Mainly because active stupidity is one of the best ways to motivate people to both join and oppose you, and if you can figure out a way to profit off of both responses – you've really done something.
There are a few people who have really done something.