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RE: [Steem] Steem Per Mvests Leads to Bot Island
[...] so I have to roll back to ask about the initiatory choice that causes this particular operation to get signaled? Does it apply whenever an account is set to power down?
Exactly! The power down is started with a withdraw_from_vesting operation. Seven days after this comes the first fill_vesting_withdraw operation that converts 1/13 of the VESTs into STEEM based on the current steem-per-mvest ratio. 12 more fill_vesting_withdraw operations follow in the remaining 12 weeks so that after 13 weeks all VESTs from the initial withdraw_from_vestingoperation are converted into STEEM.
That's – interesting.
It's particularly interesting because even as I shrunk the time horizons on my query, these operations decreased in total volume, both standard and nonstandard, about as you would expect – but the transactions like this, with a different from and to account, became a larger proportion of those transactions in general.
Which leaves us with the question of what these things actually represent. I am willing to accept that some of them, particularly the smaller clusters, just represent a small bot host owner powering down their bots which gained SP one way or another. That's a perfectly normal sort of activity, even if I'm not particularly on board with how useful bots are compared to how abusive they can be.
It's the ridiculously large clusters, with dozens to hundreds of nodes, that concern me. They have enough accounts in them that they could probably keep a number of them rolling over every week and generate a consistent payoff almost daily assuming that they could continue to farm the SP somehow.
An extremely small number of accounts is responsible for 1/3 (or more, depending on how we split it) of the this particular type of transaction of transactions which occurs on the blockchain every day. That seems concerning to me.
I suppose the next step is to try and figure out what these things are doing, if anyone cares.