Did INS Buy Votes?
Hi Friends,
I promise I'm not just saying this because I'm a sore loser. On the contrary, the information seems to be stacking against them.
Much of this contest, we have been battling with Verge for the top spot. They are another coin that actually has a pretty big following and user base. Then out of the blue, a relatively unknown coin with a small user base suddenly comes up with thousands of votes in the final hours. I smell something a little fishy.
There are plenty of vote buying groups out there where you can pay people to vote for things with their email addresses. It's not uncommon in contests like this for that kind of behavior to take place.
In fact, I was having a conversation about this with my wise friend @denmarkguy and he informed me that Netcoins actually removed thousands of votes for suspicious voting patterns from other coins like PAC and Verge.
This gives me hope that Netcoins will review the votes from the final day before officially declaring a winner. Of course, it is possible that these are all legitimate votes - it just seems highly suspicious and I trust that Netcoins will look into it before announcing a winner.
I'm Proud of This Community
No matter how things turn out, I'm super excited to see how this community rallied together under one common purpose. Big love to @oracle-d for spotting this opportunity and then even bigger love to the entire Steemit community for embracing it. Verge was a serious competitor for this contest, and we blew them out of the water. All thanks to the passion and dedication of this community.
I love that so many amazing groups/steemains such as @anomadsoul, @sndbox, @blocktrades, @aggroed, @cryptocurator, and @nathanmars jumped on board and generously donated prizes or votes to encourage people to get out and vote. I'm sure there were many more that I either missed or forgot.
I love this community and how much we can all come together to make something awesome happen. Winning this is so much more than just saving $30,000 to be listed. It is about exposure, press and camaraderie.
More of my Steemy Adventures
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When I saw the vote bump with verge and INS I went through all their social media accounts and joined their telegram communities and I can say there was no where near the amount of banter about netcoins as it was on steemit! It has to be vote farming!
I only hope their is some sort of due diligence process when evaluating the votes as well as the project itself! Verge is a shitcoin that was hacked twice and INS is a nothing project with such low transaction volumes it’s a joke! Listing either 2 wouldn’t benefit netcoins compared to what steem would do it would be them shooting themsleves because it wouldn’t drive adoption of their service! If anything they just lost 15k users off the bat if they ignore steem
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I could not have said it any better @chekohler
Yeah we will see how everything turns out. Seems pretty unlikely they could pull that many votes out of a hat organically - but we should have some clearer information on it pretty soon I would think.
Solely the fact that INS achieved that sudden big amount of votes only on the last minutes of the contest, is clear evidence that all those votes were product of some kind of automatisms, bots, AI, votes farming or votes purchased in a few of those many fraudulent services out there online.
I might get shot down by people for saying this, but the netcoins thing didn't smell right to me from the start. They had no traffic prior to this contest; (I get it, that's what marketing campaigns do!) - and there's little about them on the typical cryptosphere (Reddit, BitCoinTalk, Twitter, etc)
The domain has been around for a few years:
Steem has driven the most traffic to the site: (other than google)
Look at that spike in activity!
Thanks for the counter perspective @holoz0r. Super interesting to see some of the stats. Sorry if this is a dum question - but it sounds like they are mostly a crypto ATM. Does that mean that many people would use their service without really knowing it was Netcoins or without ever viting their site? Like they would just use the ATM to transact and then walk away.
Well either way... now they have all of our emails. LOL
Yeah I was calling them out earlier today about how the free 30k listing fee was nothing compared to getting 60k+ crypto emails. They clearly got the better deal. Worst case if they blast us with spam, at least gmail is good at filtering it out these days.
I have a spare email just for crypto based stuff that looks shady
That is pretty fishy and I must admit I didn’t take time to review it I was pretty much all aboard the hype train! Not only did they get traffic but literally 1000s of cryptocurrency enthusiasts emails and while we have GDPR to hide behind if these guys are so underhanded they are not going to give a fuck!
They will sell this list to companies or blast us with Marketing material! Some may unsubscribe while some may become new customers of whatever they send! That’s the email marketing game for sure
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Uhm, ok, now I'm starting to suspect all this Netcoins 'thang' was everything just a big prank perpetrated by @yallapapi product of his current weird experiments with his microdoses tabs of LSD. };)
I did look into Netcoins. They just started up recently. Also, the ATM thing is only available in Canada right now. They are allowed to do business in 42 American states as of my research when this thing kicked off. They seem solid, but, who knows? Hopefully it wasn"t some kind of scheme. I am sure @ned checked them out as well. I don't think he would get us involved if it is bunk.
Personally I think we have this in the bag!
Was very fishy behaviour but I noticed @jackmiller started a email correspondence with NETCOINs about the suspicion of vote farming with only a vague but hopeful response, lead it with us.
It would be in NETCOINs best interest to be transparent and also fair with this contest as first place is worth a fair amount of $ just for the listing but it also comes with promotion of the adopted coin. No way a company would want to promote a suspicious coin that won through the use of vote farming over a coin connected to a social network which has proven to be strong and bringing community together for a single purpose.
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omg nooooooo!
That DOES seem legit fishy!
And we've all been voting so hard, too!!!
It will be interesting to see how things all turn out! It sounds like they are going to take a week to review it before announcing the winner.
I saw PAC and Verge get votes taken away. The site says it will take a week to review the results. I have little doubt they will see that INS did some dirty work like the other two and award Steem with the victory.
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I don't want to sound ungrateful of the second place that we won (I mean we still get a discount of 7,500 USD on the listing fee) but the last minute run of INS seems majorly fishy. Although it was on my mind but I didn't mention it since....... well now that you have shared your doubts, it's much easier to share mine as well.
We took the lead from Verge and then lost it to them again. Weird part is that after Verge got its second wind, its vote did not increase much after that. These sudden last moment bursts of vote increase for both Verge and INS seemed artificial even as they were happening. Steem was the only one in top 3 that was rising gradually but continuously - mark of an organic growth.
what would be awesome. even if we do end up second, for steemit inc to get us listed regardless. would be a nice prize and it was so awesome to see the community come together for this.
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Oh that's a cool idea!
It is hard to imagine that INS could pull out these votes out of the blue so quickly. Something is fishy. Manipulated. Thanks @corusscate
Yeah it will definitely be interesting to see how things turn out! Luckily they seem to be actually reviewing votes for suspicious behavior.
This Knight has been on the lookout for voting fraud from day 1 - and it appears to have been rife. Reckon Netcoins will be giving us a free listing regardless, or face a Steemian backlash.
I am... SirKnight.
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I agree. I think it's been more about marketing netcoins than anything else.
Nothing stopping them from listing all 3.
Good job guys... let's wait and see what happens ;)