Steem Investigations
June the 14th, 2018
In this series, inspired by my discussion with @crypto-econom1st on @penguinpablo 's Daily Steem Stats Report, we will periodically (sometimes daily, sometimes weekly, depending on my motivation and the free time I have) investigate an operation on the Steem Blockchain.
The goal here is not to ostracize anyone, but only to discover some behaviours that we may not know about. As the blockchain allows transparency to some extent, we will use that leeway to investigate (for the sake of discovery and curiosity) strange / singular / odd behaviours and/or operations.
If you're selected, please don't be offended !
I'm not pointing fingers at anyone, and everyone is free to do whatever he wants !
I'm just doing this out of curiosity !
The data
Today, we will just extract the 50 biggest transfers that happened yesterday (2018/06/14 UTC) and select the one that is the strangest.
As I don't have access to SteemSQL, I will use Python and the beem module by holgern (@holger80). Of course, if this series has a bit of success, or at least people participating in the comments, I might take a subscription to SteemSQL, to be able to make faster and more complex extractions.
Code to extract the data (loop between blocks 23299572 - sblock - and 23328363 - eblock)
Then the TOP 50 in STEEM and in SBD are put them in a CSV file, from which I select a transfer to investigate (pure subjective choice). The extraction took approximatively 30 minutes (0.067 seconds per block on average / 28791 blocks).
The Chosen One
The transfer we will investigate today is...
The Investigation
So here we got a transfer from @maiyude to @robotq for an amount of 3800 STEEM.
@maiyude seems to be a geniune account, with real posts, mostly publishing with the #cn, #cn-art, #art tags, remastering crypto-currencies logo in an artistic and graphic way.
What is strange, is the upvotes received (not on the posts of the account, but on comments on other accounts' posts), here's an extract:
We can see patterns of circle voting here (with @abit, @gogoabc, @robotq, @fishaa, @fishbb, @fishcc, @fishdd, @tinna).
And another argument for the circle voting theory is the way the upvotes take place, on old posts in the comments:
It seems we're confronted with a textbook case of circle voting. But the mistery of the 3800 STEEM transfer remains. It hasn't been powered up, and stays for now on the @robotq account. Leading me to conclude both accounts (and some more in the circle maybe) are owned by the same person.
We can clearly say that a lot of these accounts are linked, seeing the transfers coming to @robotq:
These transfers come from powering down on the accounts. So it seems like the circle is stopping and every STEEM is being transferred back to one account.
But this also attracted my attention:
Translation (according to Google) is:
Thank you for your support to FF Bank!
What is this FF Bank ? It seems like everything is more complex now. As I don't speak Chinese, I won't be able to investigate further on the matter, but for a first episode, it looks like we stumbled on something interesting.
And the fact that @robotq systematically downvotes every comment of @biblegateway (known spammer) is also strange as it's not reciprocal. Why would a circle voting scheme be interested in reducing a spammer to silence ?
The blockchain will never stop to surprise us !